Even if it seems that SATA drives is a tiny bit faster, the fact is they ARE faster.
2 of the fastest IDE drives in Raid 0 isn´t near what 2 Raptors are in speed.

However, the cost of one Raptor doesn´t justify a buy yet unfortunatly. They have to get up to around 100 gigs for the price it is on right now and i believe that will happen soon. This year even.

SATA has had some "viruses" in the beginning, but that is because of some incompetent chipsetmakers gave their chips to motherboard manufacturers to quickly, long before the first serious drives where on the market.

One thing the motherboard manufacturers HAVE to change is the connectors on the motherboard, they are far to easy to break if you fumble inside your case in the dark. The effective height of the connector and the cable together is about an inch which obviosly is quite dangerous.

One thing though ,SATA´s improvement will mean VERY cheap massive storage drives in the "old" ATA as the manufacturers will do everything they can to get rid of what they have before the total change and before SATA becomes standard.

My next drives will be SATA, most definatly.