SATA now accounts for the overwhelming majority of desktop drives sold, is on the verge of taking the lead of notebook drives, and is even beginning to eat away at the edges of enterprise and multi-user storage, all within five short years of initial specification.

After testing some 2.5" drives and carriers over the past few weeks, I'm happy to report that these devices are entirely practical for several important applications. The form-factor makes them especially useful for rack-mount and small-form-factor systems like departmental NAS boxes that require RAID for local storage, but which do not have enough physical space for four full-sized drives. And once the SATA drives are bundled together into a RAID setup, the magic of multiple spindles makes performance a non-issue.

Because iSCSI runs over standard TCP/IP links, it's easier to build, manage, and justify than FC, making SAN technology more affordable and accessible for everyone. A small iSCSI SAN can be built on top of an existing network infrastructure and even use ordinary Windows or Linux servers as remote storage arrays.

Computer Associates' ARCserve 6.5 for Windows NT represents both a minor and major upgrade over previous releases. The core product offers a slew of enhanced features and services, but ARCserve's real strength lies in its add-on optional components. Taken together, these make ARCserve 6.5 a must-have backup solution for networks of any size.

Despite the fact that Arcserve 6.1 for NetWare gave me more than its fair share of headaches during installation and configuration, the end result is a 'forget-about-it' backup solution that is there when you need it.

One of the most mundane aspects of network management is the care and feeding (literally) of backup tapes. Qualstar's TLS-4210 tape library aims to relieve you of this burden by bringing high-end tape library technology to the network market in an affordable, well-constructed package.

If there's one maxim that holds true, it's 'data expands to fill the space available.' It seems that no matter how much hard-disk space you have, people will find lots of creative ways to fill it. This unfortunate truism leads to an eternal search for more and better ways of maximizing storage options.