Thanks to disk-enabled consumer products such as the iPod, hard disks are getting smaller and cheaper, and new ways to use and access storage are fast appearing. 

Want faster hard disks for your desktop computer? Think Serial ATA (SATA), the now-affordable upgrade for desktops and low-end servers.

If you look inside a desktop PC or server built between before 2002, you’ll see gray lasagna-like cables connecting your drives to the motherboard. They’re based on technology introduced 20 years ago, and generally called Integrated Drive Electronics (IDE).

But inside many new PCs like the one I’m building, you’ll see red or orange linguini-like cables instead, called SATA. Rather than the 18-inch maximum IDE cable length, the new SATA cables can be up to 3 feet long. More importantly, SATA connectors are much smaller those for IDE, saving motherboard space.

SATA technology transfers data up to 150M byte/sec today, and will zoom up to 600M byte/sec over the next 10 years. (IDE speeds are stuck at about 100M byte/sec). Even though SATA and IDE drive connectors aren’t compatible, your computer and software will work with SATA drives just the same as they did with IDE. 

The best part? SATA drives cost just a few dollars more than comparable IDE drives, and include at least an 8M-byte buffer for improved performance. Most affordable IDE drives have only a 2M-byte buffer. Name brand vendors are starting to offer SATA drives as options on lower-end machines, and standard on corporate or specialty systems like Media Center PCs.

SATA-equipped motherboards include two SATA connectors and usually include the software to mirror both drives (RAID 0) for hardware redundancy. A company called Accordance Systems improves this feature.

The Accordance ARAID99 2000 ($370 without drives) is a housing holding two removable drives that automatically sets up the hardware redundancy using a single SATA connection. The housing has enough intelligence to improve storage performance without confusing the motherboard.

There are three advantages to this approach:

 1. The Accordance housing and intelligence handles the disk synchronization, lowering the drag on your PC's processor.

 2. You can remove and add drives while the PC is on (hot-swap).