Our recent article, "Scream if you want to go faster", featured the performance enhancing benefits of RAID arrays. As any viditor will tell you, there's no such thing as too much drive space - and the often neglected benefit of adding a RAID controller is the extra hard drive capacity it provides. So with a RAID controller you can have your cake and eat it. With SATA drives rapidly becoming the standard, your choice will probably be a SATA RAID controller - the addition of a SATA RAID controller is therefore a great way of adding additional SATA drives to your PC.

Indeed, for viditing enthusiasts with an older motherboard, there's a few ways to benefit from the newer SATA drives. The first is to simply convert your existing IDE cable (the cable currently connected to your hard drive) to a SATA connection. With zero performance advantages, this can only be recommended if you bought a SATA drive in error. So not really a wise choice.

The second is to get a SATA PCI card, which typically adds two or four SATA connections to your PC. There's a few advantages to this method, not least being the ability to add drives in addition to those on the IDE channels. It's therefore a cheap mass storage solution for a home PC (physical space permitting!). SATA PCI cards are also available with external ports, and because the cards are based on SATA technology, drives are hot swappable - meaning you can switch drives without powering down. This is perhaps an ideal scenario for video editing, but admittedly one I have yet to test! As with the ongoing SATA vs PATA debate, there is a slight performance advantage to using the SATA interface. Adding the card to an existing windows installation is straighforward; simply fit the PCI card to a spare slot, connect the drives and follow the on screen prompts after boot. SATA PCI cards can be picked up for around £30, and this route is only economical if you've exhausted the PATA (IDE) capacity of your motherboard and want some serious space.

Finally there's the previously quoted option of a SATA RAID controller. Typically at least twice the price of a SATA PCI card, these add the benefit of RAID 0, 1 or 5 to your newly fitted drives. Again, this is a great way of adding storage capacity and at the same time increasing performance of the traditionally slower component of the modern PC.

Although most manufacturers include two or more SATA connectors on their motherboards, adding a four port SATA PCI card is a great way to increase storage capacity and take advantage of increased performance. My current viditing PC has 5 drives with room for further expansion. And if you run out of physical space inside your PC, don't forget those handy 5.25" to 3.5" converters which let you place a drive inside a CD/DVD bay! With 400GB+ drives now available, you can easily add terabytes of storage space to a home PC.