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The Old/Slow Days -

At one time selecting the hard drive for a homebuilt system required much thought. The hard drive sub-system was often one of the areas that could become most expensive. This was true mainly in systems that required the utmost in storage size and speed, which at that time was very limited.

I have been interested in video, video editing and special effects for some time now. I first 'attempted' to get into digital editing probably a decade ago. Needless to say, if you wanted to have a computer system that was up to the task, you had to be ready to spend some serious money. Even then the hardware was barely up to the task. The first system that would 'almost', sluggishly grind through the data was a 500mhz. Pentium III...and boy was it slow, and error prone.

Even though the processor, memory and other components could somewhat wade through the ungodly amounts of 1's and 0's, the real bottleneck was the hard drive of the day. Speed was a necessity and usually required a specialized hard disk (or disks), and many times a SCSI controller.

Although the harware advanced quickly, RAID (Random Array of Independent Drives) systems were still used just to have the additional headroom to make sure that the incoming video could be stored fast enough. RAID sub-systems are still used quite often in today's computer systems when very high storgae systems are needed, or in a 'mirroring' configuration that provides a realtime backup of the computer data. Should one hard drive fail, the other keeps right on working. The failed drive can usually be 'hot-swapped' (replaced while the system is being used), and there is no loss of data.

Parallel ATA Goes Serial and Gets FAST -

With the technology of the last few years, the SATA (Serial Advanced Technolgy Attachment) bus allows for speeds reaching 6Gbits/sec. (SATA-IO) at the time of this writing. The SATA controller is a replacement for

the PATA (parallel) technology, providing hot-swappable drives, greatly increased speeds, smaller, thinner cables for better cooling and better data integrity checks. (SATA ports shown)

Although the technical aspects of the in-depth operation of the modern SATA controller and hard drives is beyond the scope of this article, the reader should just be made aware of the technology and should shop wisely when selecting their next computer system and/or components in which to build their own system.

The first computer owned by this writer that incorporated a hard drive, had only a 10mb (that's MEGA) drive, was very expensive, and unbelievably slow.

SATA for the Near Future (at least) -

So, if you happen to be shopping for a new computer, chances are that if spending a reasonable amount of money, and buying a name brand computer from a reputable source, chances are that you'll get a SATA drive that is more than fast enough to handle any data that you can throw at it. The only choice should only be the size, and witht the huge capacities available now, I'd go for something as big as your wallet will allow. Even though that huge drive may seem to have unlimited storage, applications tend to become bigger with the increased drive sizes.

Also, I mentioned RAID previously. If you're not real good about backing up your data regularly, you should consider a RAID in mirroring mode. That provides a continuous, hot-swappable data backup system. However, you should ALWAYS keep another backup (at least one), on another medium, at another location if your data is extremely important. Also, with eSATA, adding external SATA (eSATA) drives to equipped systems, is convenient and relatively inexpensive, providing large, fast, reliable external storage.

Even though other interfaces such as fiber channel and Infiniband promise even greater data transfer speeds, the SATA technology should provide a comfortable headroom, reasonably priced solution for some time to come.