This is a mixture of a comment and a question.
There seems to be very little hard information about using SATA drives in Linux yet, in particular I can't find anything much for the *user* on how to set up a SATA/AHCI system.
In particular there seems little help on which kernel one should choose to install a SATA/AHCI based system. The SATA drives appear as SCSI drives to the software when they are AHCI ones but nowhere tells you whether you need a SCSI kernel or an ATA/IDE one in this situation. Considering the possible permutations of AHCI on/off and possible kernels one might choose it could take a long time to get it right!
I've got my system working OK now but I'm still unclear on how much IDE support I still need compiled into the kernel, I may not need any at all but there seems nowhere to find out.
The best information I've found so far is at:-
http://linuxmafia.com/faq/Hardware/sata.html
... but this doesn't help a lot on the actual 'how to configure it' front.