Is my hard drive SATA or PATA?

Windows Device Manager
Click the arrow next to "Disk Drives" to display the list of drives installed on your notebook. SATA drives generally will be referred to as "SATA," "S-ATA" or "Serial ATA," while PATA drives may be referred to as "PATA," Parallel ATA," "ATA" or, on older drives, simply as "IDE" or "EIDE."

Lot more interesting detail can be read here. Thereof, which is better SATA or PATA?

The primary reason SATA is used over PATA is because of the increased data transfer speeds with that SATA. PATA is capable of data transfers speeds of 66/100/133 MBs/second, whereas SATA is capable of 150/300/600 MBs/second. You'll notice that SATA's slowest speed is still faster than PATA's fastest speed.

Subsequently, question is, what is the difference between a SATA and IDE hard drive? The main difference between IDE and SATA is that the IDE provides a parallel connection to connect the storage device to the computer bus while SATA provides a serial connection to connect the storage derive to the computer bus.

Keeping this in consideration, how can I tell what kind of hard drive I have?

In order to find the model number, simply right-click on Computer and go to Properties. Next click on the Device Manager link on the left. You can also just open Control Panel and click on Device Manager from there. Now expand Disk drives and you should see the model number of your hard drive, like shown below.

Is SATA serial or parallel?

Serial ATA (SATA) Often abbreviated as SATA, Serial ATA is an evolution of the Parallel ATA physical storage interface. Serial ATA is a serial link — a single cable with a minimum of four wires creates a point-to-point connection between devices.