I don't think those new Maxtors fully exist in the retail channel yet, but they do look nice on (virtual) paper.

Native command queuing is a nice refinement over the Tagged-Queuing that the Raptors and Deskstars already have, but there's not a lot of O/S support out there for either form yet.

Under Linux, it makes very little difference since the O/S already sorts the queues rather effectively. Under another O/S your mileage will vary.

SATA interfaces are faster than PATA, usually because the host controller chip buffers the register accesses locally at PCI bus speed, and only transfers them to the drive when needed. Even the few that don't work this way are still faster, simply because SATA PIO speed (1.5Gb/s) can be faster than many controller's PIO rates for command writes (120-600ns).

There are many native SATA drives available NOW, and not all of them are PATA with a bridge chip soldered on. I've got a good selection here, and like what I see.

(for newbies, I work on PATA/SATA/RAID drivers for much of my living).

Cheers

EDIT: one more plus here is that most SATA controllers are now designed with 66Mhz/64-bit PCI interface logic, and sometimes are even wired up that way on motherboards. I have one here that's on a 64/66 expansion card, with TCQ/NCQ/HQ/HWRAID etc.. Quite fast. With my drivers, anyway.