I'm pretty sure you can, haven't had the opportunity to try it out myself but for SATA to be a viable competitor to PATA (what we know as IDE), it must have that inherent capability. Otherwise machines that only have SATA HDD's out of luck, and that's no use cos then you'd have to have an IDE as well as the SATA, thereby increasing the cost of ownership on the technology.
I could be totally wrong here, but I'm 99% sure that this is the case. And I haven't even done any research on it. Will look into it at some point though as I plan to go SATA-only for my next machine.