Sata drive performance to me does not seem to be that much better than IDE/PATA. I'm running a 250GB Sata drive, with 2 80GB PATA drives for extra storage space. The 150 MB/Sec transfer rate of SATA is well beyond what most current home HDD's support, but is usefull if you're using a SATA ramdrive or other solid state media.
SATA is also hot swappable, which is nice for server use as you can simply undo a rack and pull a drive w/o having to turn off power or shut down an operating system.
As for loading extra drivers in windows setup, this depends on your motherboard chipset. My N-Force 4 chipset was happy enough with the standard drivers loaded by windows xp setup in the first place. Since I am anal about cable management I like the sata cables though, so easy to make them nice and pretty and tied in place, without taking up lots of room or having to resort to complex origami like constructions just to hide darn IDE cables.
SATA is also hot swappable, which is nice for server use as you can simply undo a rack and pull a drive w/o having to turn off power or shut down an operating system.
As for loading extra drivers in windows setup, this depends on your motherboard chipset. My N-Force 4 chipset was happy enough with the standard drivers loaded by windows xp setup in the first place. Since I am anal about cable management I like the sata cables though, so easy to make them nice and pretty and tied in place, without taking up lots of room or having to resort to complex origami like constructions just to hide darn IDE cables.