New Debian installation

[Alex The Koala <koalillo@gmail.com>]

Hi all,

My old "server" machine is croaking and I'm going to get a
replacement. Of course, Debian is getting installed here.

I have been off the hardware loop and the Debian-installing loop for
some time and I have two questions:

1) SATA support: namely, does Debian support it out of the box? I
guess I'll have to choose a 2.6 kernel during installation to use it.
2) Installing testing: what's the suggested way? Use the stable
netinst and set it to install testing or use a testing snapshot? I'm
worried about "stability" of the testing installer (or rather, I guess
the stable netinst image will be 100% rock-solid, whereas testing
might be 99.9% :)

Thanks,

Alex