Serial ATA (SATA) disk technology has made a major jump recently in the form of "SATA-II" specification drives that run twice as fast as their predecessors—a hypothetical maximum transfer rate of 3 gigabits per second (Gbps). With disk capacities climbing steadily, system builders can now achieve the vaunted heights of terabyte storage (more or less) with just two drives. In this TechBuilder Recipe, I'll take you through the steps of building a compact, self-contained system with a near-terabyte of speedy storage.

Why near-terabyte? Well, as anyone who's been in the business a while knows, hard-drive manufacturers persist in calling every 1,000 bytes a kilobyte, even though a real kilobyte is 1024 bytes. For the sake of an example, imagine a disk maker builds a platter that stores 1 million bytes; the company would no doubt market this product as a 1 MB drive, even though the drive technically falls short of a megabyte by some 24,000 bytes. Back in the real world, this means our "terabyte" configuration actually clocks in at about 930 GB. A whopping 70 GB are lost to marketing!

If you're new to SATA technology, it's enough to know that SATA brings a modest speed boost over SCSI and parallel ATA drives, but with a lot more airflow and ease of installation, due to a drastically reduced cable size. Even better, it's possible to build a competent high-speed system based on SATA-II drives without needing to invest in pricey add-on cards.

Ingredients

Here are the components you'll need for this project, along with specific products I recommend:

• Two Seagate Barracuda 7200.9 SATA NCQ 3-Gbps drives: The road to terabyte data storage begins here. Seagate's latest high-capacity drives sport 16 MB of RAM and run reasonably quietly, albeit a touch on the warm side. Priced at $360 each, these are "pure SATA" drives, not the early-generation drives that came with both SATA and Molex power connectors.

• Aspire X-QPack MicroATX case: Although not a true small form-factor (SFF) box, this compact case is a good compromise between size and flexibility. It sells for about $80. This case provides plenty of room for adding necessary components: two internal 3.5-inch hard-drive bays, one external 3.5-inch bay, and two external 5.25-inch bays. The power supply is rated for 420 watts, so it's more than sufficient to handle a modern CPU and a pair of hard drives. Depending on the vintage of the case's manufacture, it may come with only one SATA-ready power plug; if so, you may need to obtain a Molex-to-SATA pin converter for an extra dollar or two.

• Gigabyte Tech GA-K8N51GMF-9 motherboard: At around $80, this MicroATX motherboard is garnering a lot of acclaim from builders and enthusiasts for being an affordable do-it-all unit. The AMD Athlon 64 (Socket 939) board is powered by the Nvidia GeForce 6100/430 chipset and provides solid, quality on-board video; dual-channel memory controllers; two PCI-Express slots (one 1x, one 16x); two standard PCI slots; as well as on-board gigabit Ethernet, USB 2.0, and FireWire connections. For a user, the only significant compromise might be in the video-out department, as the board provides only one analog VGA output. Builders whose customers have dual-monitor and/or DVI requirements should add a dual-head PCI-Express x16 video card to the slate. Most important for our purposes, the board can accommodate as many as four 3-Gbps SATA disks, in addition to as many as four conventional ATA/133 drives.

• AMD Athlon 64 3200+: Nothing gaudy, this high-speed 64-bit CPU will provide plenty of power for most desktop-use scenarios. At $180, it won't break your budget, either.

• PQI D400 512DAH pack: This package of two 256-MB DDR400 modules provide good latency at a reasonable price: $45 for the pack. The motherboard can't handle DDR2 modules, so this is the fastest we can go.

• Asus DRW-1608P2 16X Double Layer DVDRW Drive: At just $50, this optical drive provides both solid performance and flexibility.

• Microsoft Windows XP Professional: With the commercial release of Vista still about a year off, XP Pro remains the top choice for mainstream desktop computing.

• Floppy disk drive: Yes, we still need one, in this case to load the RAID driver when installing the OS.

• Any Windows or DOS PC, and one spare floppy disk: As a cost-cutting measure, Gigabyte does not supply the RAID driver on floppy, so you must make your own from the included driver CD.