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.

The Serial ATA (SATA) Revision 3.0 specification has been released by the Serial ATA International Organization (Sata-IO) and promises double the data speed across the board to 6Gbps.

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.

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.

Want to perform an extreme makeover of your system's motherboard, processor, memory or hard disk? We'll show you how.

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.

The next generation of SATA will double the transfer speed of storage from three to six Gbit per second.

Storage firm Seagate has unveiled what it claims is the fastest desktop hard disk drive.

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