There are all sorts of applications for a Redundant Array of Inexpensive Drives (RAID) but the "inexpensive" part is all relative. RAID may be a good idea for servers, but making it cost effective for desktops is another story. But, tucked away in small booth behind a variety of international trade pavilions at Comdex, was a small company called NetCell which just might have a solution.

Under the brand SyncRAID, the company makes a series of RAID controllers that, when inserted into a PC, appear to the operating system as standard IDE controllers. Whereas other RAID controllers (especially SCSI ones) typically require special drivers, NetCell's SyncRAID controllers only required the standard IDE driver that ships with operating systems like Windows and Linux.

NetCell's controllers come in three- or five-port versions which, in one-to-one fashion, dictate the maximum number of ATA or Serial ATA (SATA) drives that can be connected to the controller. Once your drives are connected to a SyncRAID controller, you have your choice of RAID options. You could combine the three or five disks into one large bank of drive space, or you can take advantage of the RAID features and stripe your data across all drives or set one drive aside as a parity drive (probably the best configuration) to create a fault-tolerant drive subsystem.

So what? It's just RAID you say. Well not quite. Company officials claim that this is the first IDE controller that can write 64-bit wide words to striped ATA or SATA drives working as a RAID array. This not only means better performance for people working with exceptionally large files, but it also means fewer visits to whatever backup device (if you even have one) you're using in order to protect those valuable files from catastrophic loss. A failed drive gets rebuilt in the background while you continue to work.

How much does this rocket science cost? For standard, off-the-shelf ATA drives, the three-port controller is $150 and the five-port controller is $199. For SATA drives, it's $179 for three ports, and $250 for five ports. Not bad for instant RAID. If you're interested, load up http://www.netcell.com into your browser.

You can write to me at david.berlind@cnet.com. If you're looking for my commentaries on other IT topics, check the archives.