I have an Asus p4t motherboard. I want to purchase the new Western Digital WD3200JD hard drive. According to specs its a SATA and my motherboard takes ata100. Would this work?
No. Get yourself an ata drive. You won't see any performance difference and probably will save yourself a lot of trouble, even if you would happen to have a sata motherboard. In fact sata is a joke for 7200rpm drives. It will only be worthwile from SATA2 on, provided you use a sata2 Motherboard, os & application software written to support it. PS: look at Seagate 7200rpm drives. As a fringe benefit, they make less noise. Make sure you have a model with the internal cache buffer.
Take a look at Adaptec's SATAConnect 1205SA or Serial ATA RAID 1210SA. They are both standard size PCI cards. You will get faster throughput from the SATA drive via PCI than you will from an ATA100 drive. I use two 1210 cards in my current machine, and they have been great (you don't have to use a RAID config to use the 1210 -- it will work with a single drive).
P.S. You might consider the WD raptor 10,000 rpm SATA drives as well. But as nononsense pointed out, you're not going to see a huge difference in performance (more bang for the buck to upgrade your memory).
SATA provides no real benefit unless you're running in a RAID(0) (striped) configuration; then you'll definitely see speed improvements on the order of 2:1. But for single drives? EIDE is the way to go. Case in point, my original EIDE drives were running about 48 MB/s now with 2xSATA striped I'm seeing 104 MB/s in benchmark tests, and yes the drives 'feel' faster too. As for mobos, don't use SATA unless the mobo has it onboard, such as the Intel ICH5R southbridge. If you need to use a PCI SATA card for a non-SATA mobo then you're defeating the purpose of faster throughputs, because PCI is limited to less than what SATA can provide. The reason I say the drives feel faster is because sometimes people get too hung up on benchmarks. Stroking yourself by saying you get an extra 10% on the SiSandra benchmark is meaningless unless the machine actually gets real-world work done faster.
I agree, SATA is pain in the neck. My mobo bios doesn't have driver for SATA so if/when I need to boot an image file I can't without a bunch of extra work.
True. My backup machine has slower CPU, FSB, less and slower RAM.... yet in real-time use, I notice virtually zero difference.