The cables are very thin and easy to connect, unlike the wide IDE ribbons and fingerbusting HD power cables. You don't have the cable length issues that old SCSI drives had, and the termination issues are taken care of too.

SATA CD-ROM drives can be problematic because not all SATA controllers support ATAPI over SATA. That is, your SATA controller will probably work fine with a SATA hard drive, but may not work with a new Plextor CD-RW SATA drive. See, e.g., [link|http://z.iwethey.org/forums/render/content/show?contentid=182506|#182506].

I don't know if SATA does the magical scatter-gather type stuff that SCSI's done for years or not. Some googling would answer that.

I'm a big fan of SCSI, but it's hard for me to justify the expense these days. I've become a fan of RAID mirrors and lots of hard drive space. The biggest SCSI drive I have is a 36 GB Ultra2 drive on a TekRAM controller; my biggest SATA drive is 160 GBx2 RAID mirror. It's easy to see what I've bought more recently.

There may be some OS considerations as well. If you want to do SATA RAID you might have some issues with Linux using the common motherboard controllers.

I would use the money you've budgeted for SCSI for a RAID mirror and/or more RAM and/or an external FireWire or USB2 HD rack or something like that instead. Unless, of course, you need 15k RPM drives or the like.

My $0.02.

Cheers,
Scott.