replacement drive: SATA or PATA?

Hi guys. I'm looking to replace an old Maxtor drive that's about to die and decided on a Seagate ST3120026A (120GB 8mb 'Barracuda 7200.7 Plus'). It's only ATA100 but I know that ATA133 wouldn't really make any difference so I'm not losing any sleep over that - the price is right.

Before I order it I remembered that my motherboard has SATA connectors (it's a Gigabyte GA-7N400 Pro - nForce 2 chipset) and wondered if it was really worth getting an equivalent specced SATA version? All my other drives are ATA and I have no desire to setup a RAID. If the actual drive has the same spec will the SATA interface make any difference? And what about NCQ - does your mobo have to support that? Looking around there doesn't seem to really be a consensus whether SATA is really any better than PATA, until SATA 2 comes along at least - is that your experiences?

Any pointers appreciated.

Iain
.

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