Your Operating system, applications, data and everything else has to be stored on Hard Drives and currently there are three main types available, IDE drives are cheap but slow and basic, SCSI drives are fast but bulky, expensive and require a special interface and lastly, SATA drives which are more expensive than IDE drives but are fast and feature rich.

Our systems feature multiple SATA drives which allow you to use them in a variety of modes, normal mode is the most common method and allows you to benefit from speed gains compaired to IDE, and is very robust, this is the recommended mode. If performance is important to you then RAID 0 divides the data and the workload between the two drives so that both drives work towards a common goal and can potentially double the speed of data transfer but if one drive fails or develops an error you could loose all of your data as each drive only stores half of each file and requires the other half on the other drive to retain integrity. For secure data or peace of mind you can elect to use RAID 1 which makes duplicates of each file on the other drive so that you never loose your data because it has been created in mirror image on the other drive, the disadvantage is that writing to the drive takes twice as long and you halve your total storage capacity.