Why didn't you look into this before buying a SATA drive? lol, I would get the IDE converter and use USB2 or firewire if you can find an enclosure, the maximum transfer rate of IDE drives is nothing like as fast as 150mbs so you wont have to worry about loosing speed going back to PATA speeds of 100mbs as your drive will never reach those kinds of speeds

I already had a Western Digital drive enclosure that I was told was SATA. It had dual Firewire and USB2 already on it. I was simply going to dump the 250GBWD drive, and replace it with the bigger, faster Seagate. Of course, someone was "misinformed", and so here we are. Firewire is faster than USB2, even the 400 MB version is faster in real-world terms than the USB's claimed 480 MB speed. Firewire 800 is even faster. My concern is the bottleneck effect. Either the CardBus can handle higher sustained data throughput, or the converted SATA to IDE to Firewire.

The maximum Sustained data rate for an IDE drive like yours is about 60mb/sec so any of the interfaces you mention will be fast enough, although given the choice I would go for firewire

I do not have an IDE drive.  I have an external SATA drive.  My broken IDE drive looks very different from my SATA drive in the way it connects.  SATA is faster than IDE.  But all that can be negated by the bus speed.  The question is of relativity.  Is the PCMCIA port fatter than USB2 and Firewire 400/800?  In any case, the point is now moot, as I purchased a PCMCIA CardBus adapter with dual SATA ports that directly interface to an SATA enclosure.

In terms of raw speed, PCMCIA < USB2 < firewire 400 < firewire 800, at least practically speaking.

How many ways can I say this, your hard drive has a max transfer speed of about 60mb/sec, the interface speed is irrelevant, your drive can only transfer date at a max speed of 60mb, so even if you have an interface that allows 100gb/sec it wont be any faster as the drive is the limiting factor, just get the cheapest option