Addonics Combo RAID kit upgrades workstations in a few easy steps One important characteristic of SATA is rarely mentioned: built-in compatibility with parallel ATA. Using an inexpensive adapter, you can connect an old ATA disk drive, or any other parallel ATA device, to a SATA controller mounted on a desktop PC.That old drive won’t get any faster, but it will be freed from the inefficient master-slave paradigm of ATA and benefit from a dedicated connection to the controller. Attach a second old ATA device to that SATA controller, and you double the benefit of that migration.Moreover, every SATA controller has mirroring and striping capability that can improve the responsiveness (striping) or the resilience (mirroring) of those two old drives. That capability is a reasonably inexpensive way to make a desktop PC faster or less vulnerable, but it does take some work. In addition, setting striping or mirroring on drives is a disruptive process; the existing content has to be saved somewhere and then copied back afterwards. Having a spare set of disks is helpful, but installing additional internal drives to most PCs can be quite a challenge. Nevertheless, there is a practical and reasonably affordable solution that adds a SATA controller and a couple of removable disk drives to your PC.Addonics Technologies, a San Jose, Calif.-based company that specializes in external storage devices, offers a Combo RAID kit that consists of a SATA controller and two disk enclosures, each mounting a card to convert from ATA to SATA.Mount each enclosure into an empty slot in your computer case; it requires the same space as a CD-ROM drive. A sliding cradle inside the enclosure will host a spare ATA disk drive (not included with the Combo) and turn it into a removable unit. Once the installation is completed, you will have a SATA RAID controller connected to two empty removable disks you can use, as I did, to complete the migration. Technology Industry