Just over four months on from our massive hard drive roundup (October 2002, page 74), and Serial ATA (SATA) hard disks have finally arrived. Phew.

Upgrade to an AM2 Athlon 64 system now

Fun with a cheap and powerful Serially Attached SCSI card and 15,000 RPM drives in a blistering RAID 0 configuration.

Prepare to say goodbye to the Pentium as we reveal the next generation

Looking to build your dream machine? We explore the latest components on the market, and give you advice on which ones to hunt down, along with the general price you can expect to pay for each major component.

A $300 price tag makes this the most expensive of the 160GB drives we tested, but its cost per gigabyte is still well under $2.

Think outside the case by putting drives to work.

The Barracuda ST3160023AS is a fair performer in our labs, ranking fourth and above average when it came to handling the binary.

Narrowly edged out of the winning position by the extremely capable Seagate Barracuda 7200.7 drive, this drive has plenty to crow about.

The performance of this 200GB SATA drive was average. However, despite a three-year warranty, this fell into the lower bracket when it came to value

Western Digital markets this drive as a special edition drive for higher performance needs, but in our labs, not only has it been beaten by all other SATA drives, but its own IDE counterpart.

Chipping away at hard drives.

With CrossFire performance more erratic than SLI, and NVIDIA outgunning ATI with its Shader Model 3 cards, it's hard to recommend this board.

MSI's new motherboard is based on the Intel 865, or Springdale chipset, heralding the arrival of a host of new technologies (such as support for dual-channel DDR-RAM, AGP 8x and SATA) in Pentium 4 boards. These technologies have been commonplace in Althon boards for more than six months, and it's been an agonizing wait for many Pentium 4 fans.

Western Digital has announced its range of 250GB SATA laptop hard drives, and we have the first unit in the country under the microscope.

Another drive to feature both SATA and Molex power connectors on the rear of the unit, this drive offers both backwards compatibility with suitable motherboards and future native SATA power supplies.

Clever corner cutting gives us an affordable, upgradeable performer.

The Caviar WD2500JB is a big 250GB, and is one of three drives to breach the $500 mark. It is $80 cheaper than the WD2500JD SATA drive. Despite the three-year warranty, it’s not exactly great value; in fact, like the W2500JD, this drive carries a high gigabyte-per-dollar value.

Why are we reviewing something that is a mere 36GB? Simple -- because this one drops access times and pumps up the transfer rate. Not targeted at the home user, the 36GB WD Raptor is marketed as an enterprise-level SATA drive -- the fastest drive on offer by WD. Capacity becomes an afterthought for the Raptor with its 10,000rpm spindle concerning itself with speed, resulting in seek times of around 5.2ms, compared to the 8.9ms of a 7,200rpm drive.

New design should cut costs and space.