getting an SATA-II drive is not nearly as important as getting a mobo that supports SATA-II. These current SATA-II drives, if they are in fact SATA-II, are way too slow to see any benefit. Other improvements, like 16MB buffers and NCQ, make more of an impact than SATA-II. Eventually, when there are 148GB Raptors running at 10000RPM with 16MB buffer and NCQ, then we might start to see SATA150 as a bottleneck. Until then, SATA150 drives will be fine. Don't get me wrong, getting SATA-II support ala nforce4 is a good thing, since your next HDD upgrade will likely take advantage of it, but for your current drive, you'd be much better off looking for a Maxtor Diamondmax 10 or Seagate Barracuda 7200.8 with 16MB buffer and NCQ if you are looking for a performance 7200RPM drive. And as for NCQ, it's not a huge boost, but the boost is there, and reviewers often talk of a general feel of more respnosiveness, even if it is hard to capture in benchmarks. From that perspective, it's like Hyperthreading - hard to quantify, but definitely a smoother experience overall.