Do I need a certain kind with certain CPU/mobo set-ups? AFAIK, SATA is reserved for RAID - I'm building my first custom rig and don't think I'm up to the task of that yet.
What do you mean? All of those technologies support RAID, but none of them require you to use RAID. I'd say you're probably best off with SATA unless you either have lots of money to blow or if you do some heavy disk work like video editing - get SCSI in that case. But make sure your motherboard supports it or else you'll need to buy a card (this goes for SATA and SCSI, but many new motherboards do have SATA onboard)
SATA is not reserved for RAID. One can use a SATA drive alone, or more than one, and not use RAID. Same goes for IDE and SCSI drives.
You can also use any mobo/CPU combo you wish. Some motherboards have built-in SCSI, built-in RAID, built-in SATA (RAID and non-RAID), or any combination of the above. But you can get a motherboard without any of these. Just that if you want to use one or more of these later, you'll need to get a PCI card for whichever function you want.
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