Enhanced integrated drive electronics (EIDE), also called Parallel ATA (PATA), hard drives have been the standard in the computer industry for more than 10 years. Some newer computer system motherboards don’t have EIDE ports, but a PCI EIDE controller card can be installed to add support for EIDE drives. If you don’t know whether your computer has EIDE ports on the motherboard, refer to your computer or motherboard documentation or contact the motherboard manufacturer.
Serial ATA (SATA) hard drives are quickly becoming the new standard in hard drive technology. Motherboard manufacturers now include SATA inputs on their boards. Because of their considerably narrower cables, SATA hard drives provide increased airflow and less clutter and in the computer system compared to EIDE drives. Some older computer system motherboards don’t have SATA ports, but a PCI SATA controller card can be installed to add support for SATA drives. If you don’t know whether your computer has SATA ports on the motherboard, refer to your computer or motherboard documentation or contact the motherboard manufacturer.
RAID is an acronym to describe a Redundant Array of Inexpensive Disks. RAID is now used as an term for computer data storage schemes that can divide and replicate data among multiple hard disk drives (HDD). When multiple physical disks are set up to use RAID technology, they are said to be in a RAID array. This array distributes data across multiple disks, but the array is seen by the computer user and operating system as one single disk. RAID can be set up to serve several different purposes.
Redundancy is a way that extra data is written across the array, which are organized so that the failure of one (sometimes more) disks in the array will not result in loss of data. A failed disk may be replaced by a new one, and the data on it reconstructed from the remaining data and the extra data. A redundant array allows less data to be stored.
There are various combinations of these approaches giving different trade-offs of protection against data loss, capacity, and speed. RAID levels 0, 1, and 5 are the most commonly found, and cover most requirements.