If you're talking about ribbon cables and master and slave drives, you're talking about a standard IDE drive. The kind you probably already have.
Serial ATA is a totally different cable, so unless it's already built into your motherboard you're going to have to buy a card. It's the way to go in new PCs, but not worth it as an upgrade.
Don't bother with SCSI.
I'd just go find a 7200 rpm IDE drive from a reputable brand (western digital, maxtor, seagate) that fits your budget/size requirements, set the jumper to slave or cable select, and slap it in there. Try to find one with a cache size of 8MB (they may make larger ones now too). You don't need to install any software; Windows will take care of everything as long as the jumpers are set right.