SATA is not that big of a deal, most (if not all) of the AMD based servers Sun sells use SATA drives.
I did run into one issue that I never researched or solved. One of the patch clusters from Sun killed the SVM RAID I had set up. Because of the situation I was in at the time I just reinstalled and didn't apply that cluster. The moral of that is the same as most, test patches before pushing them out to production systems.
Pardon my previous error, I meant an ASUS board with Intel chip