My better half's system has an Intel motherboard with only one IDE port, so she has an optical device and hard drive on that ribbon cable.
She runs a SATA drive, and there is no problem.
The only problem I had installing the SATA was that I kept confusing the two sets of physical SATA plugs on the system board. One set of four was for individual drives. The other set of four was for a SATA RAID array.
I understand all of this does not directly answer your question, but I hope it's a start. I think it shouldn't be a problem.
I'm sure there are others here who will soon augment / correct my poor advice.
p.s. Welcome to the forums!