First: PATA is not garbage by today's standards. With most hard drives on the market at 7,200RPM, the additional bandwith of the SATA interface is largely irrelevant. The hard drive itself is incapable of supplying information fast enough. With a slower 4,200 drive there is really no reason to use SATA.
yes actaully it is, SATA has the capability of CRC error checking cmd and staus packets where PATA cant, therefore the communication for SATA drives is superior, also SATA cables do not impede airflow like PATA cables do in desktops (wont matter in laptops but still, SATA has this advantage in desktops).
increased bandwidth to 150MB/s is an advantage over the older 100/133 ata interface, the 150 comes into play when you do burst transfers (from your hdd cache maybe? anything to make your hdd faster will make your loading times faster)
increased voltage on your PATA connectors is needed for the older drives, generally PATA connectors must have 5v or 3.3v signal for the interface to work from the CPU because of this, your cpu needs to take more voltage on to signal your HDDs. SATA only requires 500mA.
SATA is hot swappable, PATA is not. there are many uses for hot swappable drives but im sure you can just guess.
Next fallacy: PATA IS a common interface between desktops and laptops. If a MBA dies, the HDD is compatible with any open IDE/PATA slot on any desktop motherboard, you just need a $2 adapter to make it work with the larger pin arrangement.
SATA is direct plug in whether it be 3.5" disk or 2.5" disk, no adapters, just need a SATA cable, which your mobo will probably come with 2 if you've built a computer recently. also the power connector is the same.
pata requires some kind of a converter between 2.5 and 3.5
And really, anyone who thinks they need to send their computers off to Apple or another third party to fix every freaking thing should acquaint themselves with Google. The "genius" bar and the "geek" squad might be the biggest oxymorons ever.
if you open an apple laptop you void the warranty, with any other manufacture its ok to replace your battery since most 12" laptops come with 2 anyways, also its ok to replace your ram as, ram upgrades are concidered standard use (apple doesnt think so though), acer is even ok with you changing the CPUs as theres only 1 huge access plate that you take off the bottom of most of their laptops to access CPU, RAM, Video, MINI PCIe with no warranty void stickers anywhere.
