SATA vs IDE
From Hardware-wiki
Parallel ATA (IDE): 40-pin ribbon cable, master/slave jumpers, 133 MB/s theoretical. Serial ATA: thin 7-pin cable, one device per port, 150/300/600 MB/s for SATA I/II/III.
For spinning disks the interface rarely matters; the disk is the bottleneck. For SSDs it matters entirely: use SATA III.
Adapters exist both ways. IDE-to-SATA adapters are fine for optical drives and mediocre for disks. Old boards with only two IDE channels: a cheap PCI SATA card is the usual answer.