@Herewegoagain

Thanks, it is my hope that the small donation price will attract as many peopl as possible. Until the website is live (I need DaveyD to set the FTP, subdomain, email etc. up for me so any proding in his direction would be apprecaited but I understand that he may be busy) donations can be made by transfering the money to the amiga@bezilla.org paypal account.
If we are looking at adding SATA which I think would be usefull, especially for a high end board (No P.C's feature SATA II to my knowledge so lets add that - twice the speed of SATA at 3gbps) then we should keep the Gigabit ethernet as long as the extra chips+connectors don't push the costs up too much. Having one device allready on the bus would start to bring speeds down and if you are trying to go high end or look profesional then you need both SATA and Gigabit Ethernet, esspecially in the low to mid end server markets it seems this system coulbe be targeted at with Linux.
Also Gigabit Ethernet requires CAT5e cables so only newer CAT5 stuff works. Just me being picky
IDE may be going the way of AGP for hard drives but it is still needed for CD/DVD drives unless you use SATA->IDE converters. Like AGP it is still needed for legacy compatability with hard drives.