> Does anyone have some tips on what to look for when purchasing
> mainboards with sata? Like what chipsets control the sata drives

Some of the chipsets do not support SATA's NCQ.  :-(
And some boards have a chipset that supports NCQ, and an additional
SATA controller that does not support NCQ.

I went with socket 939 and nforce4 ultra, which does have NCQ support.
I can get 65-70 MB/s per drive, sustained, from all four drives at once.
The limiting factor is the drives, not the nf4u.  (BTW, the slow end of
the disk only does ~40MB/s.)

As far as I know, NetBSD doesn't support NCQ yet, but hopefully it
will in the future.

> I'm not looking for
> a raid solution but all of these boards have some type of raid
> controller, how does that play into the equation?

I'm not using the RAID features (not yet, anyway).  Works fine.