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AS IDE HARD DRIVE manufacturers squeeze more and more storage capacity onto new drives, they're hacking the warranty coverage for standard drives down to one year. You get more data to use, but manufacturers seem less and less willing to guarantee the integrity and safety of all those extra bytes. RAID can help you take back some of that reliability, but that's not all. A RAID array can also dramatically increase your overall hard disk performance. In some cases, IDE RAID can even offer you the best of both worlds: redundancy to protect against drive failure and better overall storage performance to pry open the bottleneck.

Of course, SCSI drives have always had superior performance and reliability when compared to IDE drives, but even today SCSI remains an expensive and noisy alternative that just can't touch the price per megabyte you'll get with today's IDE drives. Serial ATA is coming, too, but it's been coming for a while. While new motherboards tout integrated Serial ATA, the drives just aren't on the market yet, and there's no telling when they'll arrive in full force. This and that manufacturer had drives on display at Comdex, but the shelves are still bare.

If you want a lot of fast, reliable storage without paying a huge price premium, IDE RAID fits the bill. As an added bonus, it's readily available now in a number of different flavors from quite a few different manufacturers. We've rounded up four IDE RAID flavors from 3ware, Adaptec, HighPoint, and Promise and run them through the wringer. Actually, we ran them through a bunch of wringers. The cards have different capabilities, features, and performance, but which one is right for you? Read on and find out.