Most recent PCs have SATA hard drives installed inside. These drives allow a lot more flexibility than older IDE drives and the like, including generally faster data transfer speeds, and the ability for hot swapping.

The thing you will notice first is that the data cable is very different to regular hard drives, being much smaller in overall dimensions, immediately alertig you to the differences.

We are starting to build a library of useful informatin on SATA devices starting with hard drives, but moving onto DVD drives and external SATA docking stations. Please contact us if you have any suggestions!