Yeah, I added an extra '9' to the index for 180 gxp, that is corrected now.
If you put your optical drives in lower bays, your cables will reach fine. Top bay was reachable with SATA, didn't try it with ata, though. If you remove the right side panel when running ata cables, you can actually run them along the side of the drive bay on that side of the case, and then bring them back in where your drive is, which will make for a cleaner run, and probably give you the longest reach on the cable. I was having trouble getting my plextor to be a bootable device off of the SI controller and switched it to ide/ata to test, and noticed this. I did get that working, btw. Just gotta remember that once it is attached to one of the sata controllers, the bios no longer thinks of it as a cdrom when you start picking your boot devices/priority.
SI controller does support hot swappable drives, according to the gui you use to manage it.
As jaeger66 mentioned, only took a 5 minute call to microsoft to get xp re-enabled. Wasn't much fun sending that 30+ digit installation id, and getting a new one back, but it worked.