SATA/IDE Compatibility?

Hey everyone, hopefully I can get some help with a few hardware questions I have.

I've been getting nasty grinding noises out of my hard drive lately, and I think it's about to go bye bye. I've got all my important data backed up and I'm looking into buying a new drive.

I have an Asus A7N8X Deluxe mobo which has a Silicon Image Sil3112A SerialATA controller installed.

First off, I plan on upgrading my machine to a core2 or similar machine setup in the next 6 months, but can't afford to do so now. Since it seems like SATA is the way things are moving now, I had thought about buying an SATA drive to replace the one that is failing and then I don't have to spend more money for another drive 6 months down the line that is SATA.

So here are my questions, keeping in mind that all I'm used to is the old standard parallel IDE type hard drives:

1. Will an SATA drive work without any problems with this mobo? I know that it has a controller for it, but I've got zero experience using SATA. Does it just plug in the way an IDE will? Do I have to set up the BIOS so that it knows to look at the SATA for the hard drive?

2. I'm assuming that this controller is the old 1.5 Mbit/s standard, since the board came out in 2004 or so. Will a newer 3 Mb/s HDD work with this board or not?

3. I have a secondary 40 Gb Western Digital internal hard drive set up as a slave drive on my machine, in addition to the master drive that has the operating system on it (the master drive is the one that is failing). Will I be able to use an SATA drive and the WD drive at the same time? I'd like to be able to continue using the WD for storage purposes. If I can't run both an IDE and an SATA drive at the same time, can I get an adapter for the IDE so that I can have it run through the SATA setup?

4. Anyone care to throw out suggestions for a good drive? The one that's failing now is a Maxtor, and is not even 3 years old. The WD is going on 8 years and I've never had any trouble with it. Not sure if I'd go with a Maxtor again, but I'd like to see what the community thinks about manufacturers in general.

Thanks in advance for all your help!