To put it simply, yes. Vista and Win7 have far more support for SATA Drives. They dont have all mind you. But they do have support for a lot.
Let me clarify this. With the amount of hardware out there and the amount of drivers needed to run every piece of hardware, the driver.cab file would be so large that it would take a 100GB Blu-Ray DVD to store all possible drivers. If that would even all fit on there.
So Microsoft has created their own drivers for use with many devices. Which is why if you look at your device manager and check all the drivers you will see some have drivers from Microsoft themselves. They have made generic drivers to work with many pieces of hardware.
So while getting Vista or Win7 would be easiest, that is not saying that they might have support for your specific SATA Drive. It is more than likely, but i can not say for sure that it will.
As far as nlite goes why not just put it on a USB Thumb Drive and transfer it to the PC you are using to respond and create the CD on that PC? It is not that tough. You would need your XP disk, enough hard drive space for the XP ISO and XP CD to be copied to the drive (So roughly about 2GB) and the SATA Drivers. Then just slipstream them into the CD and create the bootable ISO and burn it. Then you can delete all the stuff needed for nlite to free up that space again and bam, you got you XP CD with your SATA drivers.