[Where to shop for what?]

CANADA - look up the lowest price on www.shopbot.ca which searchec Canadian webshops.

 

In order to save on shipping costs (if lowest priced items are from multiple vendors), check and see if NCIX.ca has the same items, in which case they will probably price match it (item has to be the exact same, and the price in CAD).

[SATA Controller Cards]

Although our current disks don't saturate the theoretical SATA I speed, it is plausible that the communication speed could be lower on SATA II for two reasons: a) practical speed on SATA I may be lower than the theoretical, and b) the faster link will have lower latency. That being said, I would expect the difference to be fairly minor - small enouth to probably not need to worry about. But I do like raw data to prove me wrong 

[SATA Controller Cards]

About those 2-port JMB362 Cards - there have been 3 instances of these boards resulting in no POST lately. In at least two of the instances this has involved motherboards that already have a JMB 36x chip onboard. See this thread for details:

 

http://lime-technology.com/forum/index.php?topic=10165.60

 

Hopefully more people will write back about the cards in the above threads and hopefully there will be a pattern as to which motherboards work with these and which ones don't. In the mean time, I feel a caution and link to the above thread would be in order.