There's an overwhelming amount of information here and I have so little time to read, so excuse the overlap in this thread.
In my main 9600 I have a Sonnet Tempo TSATA card which has two internal SATA ports on it. It can boot your OS and works all the way down to System 7. The thing is absolutely flawless. But I just took a look, and turns out there aren't any of these things for sale. They're nowhere to be found. I'll be using this card until it stops working, so I need to come up with a gameplan for what I'll do in the future when it stops working.
It's either I stick with SATA or I go for some IDE drives. What do you think would be better, and are there any replacements for the Sonnet Tempo TSATA card that works in 9600s? Note that unlike the Sonnet Tempo card I have now, I actually DON'T need it to be bootable. I run SCSI drives for that. This is for storage and recording only.