might depend on your mobo aswell, nforce2 boards for example do not have SATA on the southbridge and SATA harddisks might use up a lot of the PCI bus. Really dont know if this would be any sort of problem though (what do you guys think?).
else, SATA seems better than PATA. Not really for performance, excepting the Raptor and Seagate drives (which are native SATA and actually get some benefits from it). But the cable seems a minor benefit for airflow, plus it will be on it's own channel (may/may not be an issue for your drive setup), and lastly it's more certain you will be able to carry over the drive to your next PC, or two.