Today, most of the storage devices come with SATA connectivity, which has pushed IDE slightly off the chat. So what matters more is to check out how many SATA ports are there, are there two different chips handling them, and finally whether they support RAID capabilities or not.

Now the trend is of having 4 SATA ports but in certain boards there are up to 8 onboard SATA ports, and RAID is generally common across the range and provides the extra layer of stability. Another important thing is IDE be¬cause of its presence in optical drive connectivity. It cannot be left behind because most optical drives still have IDE connection. So you need to check whether both are available as an option or not.