In order to have a master and a slave HDD w/ SATA, do you simply plug them both into the motherboard on serperate cables? Or is there a special cable like IDE that has two connectors?

SATA has one drive per cable, which is why motherboards usually have 4 SATA channels. And I don't think there is really a Master and Slave as such any more (I may be wrong). Plug in the drive that you want to boot from first on SATA-0 (or SATA-1 if that's the first channel number), followed by the second drive on the next available channel.

Hope that helps