It seems like every time we turn around another gigabyte of our workstation's hard drive is eaten up by new programs, large data sets or just some digital music or video. With 150-, 200-, even 250GB drives not lasting like they used to, think about teaming up several drives like workhorses to open nearly unlimited capacity horizons by using a technique called RAID for Redundant Array of Independent (or inexpensive) Drives.

This method offers performance and protection because if a drive or even two drives die on you, their contents can be rebuilt from what's on the other drives. It's never been easier and cheaper to do and only requires a specialized data controller and standard off-the-shelf hard drives. If you want to add a lot of capacity you'll probably want a rack to hold the drives, but most workstation cases can hold the three-to-five discs that are the starting point for RAID.

RAID is like a data pack rat, putting a little data here and a little there rather than on a single disk, effectively interleaving the data and spreading the load over several drives in a technique called stripping. The key is that the drives don't work as hard and the input/output operations overlap for peak performance. The technique is not only compatible with all workstation operating systems, but to the system and user, it shows up as one logical drive even though behind the scenes there are several drives chugging away.