Q: Do most motherboards have SATA drive plugs? Do I have to buy a PCI card for SATA- or ATA-compatible disk drives?

A: Server and PC motherboards are in a state of transition, as are popular chipsets like those from Intel. Consequently, some will have SATA I/O ports for attaching SATA disk and tape devices, while older servers may only have an IDE/ATA port.

Some servers are starting to appear with serial-attached SCSI (SAS) ports that can also be used for attaching SATA storage devices. And some newer servers are sporting PCI Express native adapter slots, eliminating PCI or PCI-X to PCI Express bridging and enabling better performance.

If your server doesn't have a SATA I/O port or if you need additional ports, you can install a PCI or PCI-X SATA port in your system. How-ever, for backwards compatibility with IDE/ATA, you would need an IDE/ATA port.

--Greg Schulz, founder and senior analyst, StorageIO Group