Upgrading your hard drive is a great way to wring more performance from your PC, particularly if you frequently load large applications or files.Hard drive performance may be especially important with demanding applications such as video editing. In this Tune-up, we step through the ultimate hard drive upgrade, adding two blazingly fast Serial ATA (SATA) drives in a performance-enhancing RAID 0 array. (For a quick refresher on the pros and cons of the different types of RAID, see the page Reasons to RAID.)
SATA supports throughput as fast as 150MB per second, even in first-generation products, topping Ultra ATA/133's maximum speed of 133MB per second. Second-generation SATA products will double maximum throughput to 300MB per second. Plus, SATA uses a compact cable that's significantly smaller than an ATA ribbon, allowing for less clutter and better airflow.
Unless your PC is fresh off the assembly line, adding one or more SATA drives will likely require installing an ATA PCI controller from a company such as Promise Technology or Adaptec. We chose the US$75 Adaptec SATA RAID 1210SA controller, which can connect two drives in a RAID 0 or 1 configuration. We completed our array with two 10,000rpm 74GB Western Digital Raptor hard drives, priced at US$239.99 apiece. We installed the SATA array as the boot drive in a Windows XP system alongside an existing ATA hard drive.
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