My dream of making a 1TB SATA RAID 5 array came so much closer to being a reality when I read this article on the Maxtor 300-GB SATA Drive Kits.

Going for $239.95 and $279.95, which will provide you with 250-GB and 300-GB of pure SATA loveliness respectively, the Maxtor SATA Ultra16 hard drives boast a 16-Mbyte buffer and spin at 7,200 RPM. No SATA card is provided, however, so you will have to provide your own means of handling that. Not a problem when most modern boards now provide this. Motherboards from companies such as Gigabyte even come with onboard SATA RAID controllers, although for the SATA RAID 5 I am talking about, you would almost certainly need a dedicated card. But forget all of this RAID talk - even just as a single disk one of these will provide solid performance and speed as well as the latest HDD technologies. As a system disk for your OS installation, one of these would be a real winner. Certainly for anyone who has multiple drives in a small case just for the increased disk space, a nice big sized single disk like this would do very well.