In 2005, I purchased a Dell desktop PC with a BTX chassis and a 160 GB SATA hard drive. When I started using Acronis True Image and Acronis Disk Director, I got a second 90 GB SATA drive.

I was pleased with the speed of the SATA drives, but their best feature is how easy it is to connect and disconnect them. The cables are completely different from the old style ATA drives. I have gotten sore knuckles (many times!) from swapping the cables on my backup ATA hard drives in their external drive enclosures.

In July 2007, I decided to upsize my SATA drives to 320 GB. I bought the "Seagate Barracuda 7200.10 ST3320620AS (Perpendicular Recording Technology) 320GB 7200 RPM 16MB Cache SATA 3.0Gb/s Hard Drives". They seem to work well, and they are quite fast. It only took about 40 minutes to clone 120 GB of data between the two drives.

I created a couple of movies with my Sony digital camera to show how quick and easy it is to swap / disconnect / connect the drives:

First movie - 37 seconds - 13 MB

Second movie - 65 seconds - 23 MB

Last modified: November 28, 2011