Look at this way. There would be two options in considering (in my opinion) for a workstation, and keep it cheaper than SCSI. 1. Striped drives (RAID 0), meaning more performance. You take two identical drives ( If you want, otherwise the bigger one will be seen as the size of the smaller one. ) set them up into a RAID stripe method. To my understanding you get twice the speed, and (of course) twice the size. The RAID will then see this as one drive. i.e. two 40GB Seagates Barracudas, (or something) so not only is your 7200RPM drive speed increased you will also see them as one drive. 2. You can do a RAID 1 (mirror), which you do the same setup as a stripe method, but instead of any increase your main drive is copying itself to the other drive, hence the name "mirror". Just a easy backup pretty much. In benchmarks, running two 7200RPM hard drives in RAID 0, (striping) almost matches up to the speed of a SCSI 160 setup, which is pretty damn fast. Also, most motherboards with RAID built-in, or even if you get a RAID controller you're going to have the ability to hook-up 4 other drives to the IDE channels. I hate hooking anything else in the same channel as my hard drive (i.e. ZIP, CD-ROM, etc.), it slows it down too much. I hope that helped.