SATA is faster then IDE and the advantage of RAID if you ever decide to go that route.
Huh?? RAID is completely independent of SATA/IDE :-\.. You can have a RAID setup with IDE HDDs. And simply b/c SATA is capable of deliverying information faster through its interface doesn't mean HDDs take advantage of it these days. IDE based setups (these days) should provide similar performance due to the HDDs bottlenecks.