Sata?

  It's been a long time since I built my last computer and I'm getting ready to build a new one. I was wondering what the pros and cons of sata are, and maybe get a comparison to ata. Thanks in advance.

in fact, sata and sata 2 is kinda useless, unless you consider the technical improvements on the sata hard disks itself (NCQ for example). the performance limiting factor at ´hard disks was never the connection to the motherboard, but mechanical and physical limits.  due to these limits todays ordinary hard disk cant afford more than 60-70 megabyte per second. my maxtor 300 gb sata2, 7200rpm, 16mb cache reaches 60  mb/s for example and my 1 and a half year old 160gb ide disk reaches 50mb/s.
if you want hard disk performance then use raid0.