I've also heard one of the "benefits" of SATA was, assuming you used the
special power plugs instead of the standard 4-wire one we all love (and have eight
of on our power supplies anyway), you'd get hotswappability. A vital feature
in a desktop, I know. :P Supposedly, the special plug's more delicate, prone
to falling out, compared with the old ones.
Aside: Whatever happened to the "3.5 x 1 inch" form factor for hard discs?
It would allow an ample heatsink, letting the PCB run cool. Having to
organise special cooling on ordinary 7200rpm desktop drives seems a bit absurd.
For speed: Notice even that expensive, "ultra fast" WD Raptors don't even
sustain 66Mbps. That's the celing on the UDMA-66 standard (two generations of
UATA ago). The interface doesn't bottleneck right now, in fact it rarely does.
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