STORAGE SPEED is currently one of the most critical bottlenecks for system performance, especially when paired with today's high-end processors and high-bandwidth platforms. While mainstream users in particular seem more impressed with how much storage capacity today's high-end hard drives offer, these new drives also boast much improved performance, lower noise levels, and larger caches.

Right now, the ATA hard drive landscape looks pretty good, and it's about to get even better. Current ATA hard drives use the ATA/100 and ATA/133 specs, which are limited to transfer rates of 100 and 133MB/sec, respectively. These drives use bulky 80-pin ribbon cables that clutter case interiors and interfere with internal air flow, but help is on the way. The new Serial ATA standard promises transfer rates of up to 150MB/sec using thin, flexible cables might make some wonder how they got by with IDE ribbons at all.

Already, Serial ATA has many of us referring to older ATA/100 and ATA/133 standards as "parallel ATA," but is Serial ATA really all that? And just how fast are today's high-end ATA/100 and ATA/133 hard drives, anyway? We've rounded up high-end parallel ATA and Serial ATA hard drives from Maxtor and Seagate, and a parallel ATA drive from Western Digital and run them through a brutal gauntlet of performance tests to find out. Read on as we discover which parallel and Serial ATA drives rise above the rest and emerge from our benchmarking melee victorious.