Personally, I only buy Samsung drives if I can. But that's me.
It really depends.. does your MB support SATA? I assume that it does. The highest data transfer rate you're going to achieve with a regular IDE ATA drive is 133, whereas, SATA has transfer rates up to 150 (mbps, I believe).
So, no.. you don't have to go with SATA, but it certainly is better and will be the future of HD connections for some time. Also, you'll need SATA drives if you ever plan on going with a RAID connection.