I didn't get my SATA drive for performance, but I can tell it works very well. Better than my older ATA drives. I got the 250GB Western Digital drive.

This is a good site for reviews. Here's the review of the 250GB drive.

I agree, the 10K drives are nice and fast, but it's tough to justify that price. I'd probably be willing to get the 36 GB for purely an OS drive, but I'd want it for video editing, and that wouldn't leave space for much video.

Also, it's a bit of a pain to load the drivers correctly to boot with one of these, depending on how you're set up. I love having mine as a simple storage drive. I currently have nothing but TV shows on it, and it's half full