Reinvent Your PC

Maximum Storage

Remember the days when you pondered how you'd ever fill your cavernous 20GB hard drive? With ever-growing demands for data storage to house photos, music, movies, and other large files, hard drives have ballooned in capacity. As file sizes grow, the drives also have to push more data to the PC faster. And while simply buying and installing one new hard drive might suffice for some people, how do you ensure that if one day that drive dies, your data will be protected? You could back up your files to an external hard drive, or you could use RAID technology, which, in one configuration, could let you keep working if a hard drive dies.

To keep ahead of the performance curve for storage, you might want to consider adding new technologies, such as Serial ATA hard drives, to your PC. You can also use a different configuration of RAID to speed up data transfers.

Serial ATA is a high-performance replacement for the old parallel ATA (also called IDE) connection between the system board and disk drives. The newer drives transfer data at 150 mbps, roughly 50 percent faster than your present IDE disk drives. SATA is not only faster than IDE, it's also easier to set up: You don't have to deal with jumpers, and SATA's smaller cables fit inside the PC's case more neatly than wide, crumpled ribbon cables.

RAID (which means Redundant Array of Independent Disks) offers enormous performance gains--double the performance of a standard IDE hard drive, compared with a SATA drive's improvement over IDE. If you use SATA drives in a RAID configuration, the performance gains can be even higher. But RAID is harder to set up and more expensive. For example, unless your motherboard has a RAID controller built in, you will need a special adapter card, such as the Promise FastTrak TX4300 (pictured above; prices start at $125), plus two or more hard drives.

Switching to SATA

If your system board already has a SATA interface (look for a pair of thin black connectors), you're already set up to add a SATA drive. Otherwise, you'll need an add-in board.

Adding to or replacing IDE drives with SATA requires some preparation. You must first install the drivers for your SATA interface so Windows will recognize the newly connected drives. If you want to replace the IDE drive, you must also copy (or install) Windows and your programs to the SATA drive. If you're using the SATA drive just for additional storage, simply power down the system, plug in the SATA drive(s), and then after you reboot, use Windows Disk Manager to partition and format the drive. (For full steps and instructions, click here.)

Most hard drive makers also include a data copying utility with their drives; alternatively, you can use a program like Symantec's Norton Ghost 9 ($50).