sata vs pata drives

[drifter106]

in researching various boards and cpu's I have found that the msi 939 board has a corruption issue with the sata hd. Although discussion has brought out the fact that by connecting your drives to port 3 and 4 instead of 1 and 2 will get around this problem. Anybody know for sure?

Does that mean you can't use raptors on these boards?

What difference is there beween sata and pata drives performance wise?

Need to know before I start buying this stuff...

thanks