Is there is advantage to a Sata DVD....?

excelscior · February 29th, 2008, 03:35 PM

Is there any advantage to having a SATA DVD burner optical drive versus a regular IDE DVD burner optical drive? I recently bought 3 of the SATA type for my pc. All my other pc's have the regular IDE connection type DVD burner opticals. My co-worker said that he had read in early reviews that there was no speed or technology advantage whatsoever versus the older type burners. Is this true about the SATA type opticals? I know he had seen those reviews early when they just started coming out with those burners. its been awhile since SATA burners types have been available.I bet him some coffee that there has to be some sort of advantage to convert over. Unless Mobo manufacturers were considering going SATA instead of IDE connections. Maybe opticals device makers just wanted to keep one step ahead of the mobo making companies. Anyone have any knowledge on this topic? Thanks in advance.

Steve R Jones · February 29th, 2008, 04:55 PM

Don't take him to $tarbucks when you buy the coffee

Course you could argue the smaller cable improves airflow and looks nicer..

Peter M · February 29th, 2008, 05:24 PM

Well since even 20x burners peak at less than 30 MB/s throughput, there is no speed advantage between a SATA model and the same thing on IDE, even if the latter runs just UDMA33.

Fact.

Really.

What Steve said is actually the only advantage in SATA opticals - the cable is easier to handle, and unlike IDE, the maximum allowed SATA cable length is enough to reach to the top drive slot even in high tower cases.

What you mentioned is the other reason for why there are SATA opticals: IDE is next on the list of legacy interfaces to disappear from chipsets. This means that for continued IDE support, mainboard makers have to add discrete PCI-IDE interface chips - and of course, that costs money, so mainstream box makers don't do that.

browncoat · March 3rd, 2008, 07:51 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Peter M

and of course, that costs money, so mainstream box makers don't do that.

Forcing old farts like me to go to the industrial market where I can get support for my legacy gear.

Brands like Supermicro(which I can't find)
iBase(expensive but worth it if you need it)
Avantech via retailer L-Tron or where I'm going:

http://www.transduction.com/transduc/atx865g.htm

reasonable at about 360.00 including cpu and they're close to home and I need ISA and I hate how the "mainstream" with retailers like newegg and
Tigerdirect are abandoning long time users to please the achnehead gaming crowd.

osprey4 · March 3rd, 2008, 08:09 AM

There are definitely aspects of SATA that make it easier to install and configure. No need to worry about "master" and "slave", "PIO mode" and all those things that make IDE a pain in the butt. So SATA does remove some potential bottlenecks.

browncoat · March 3rd, 2008, 08:24 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by osprey4

There are definitely aspects of SATA that make it easier to install and configure. No need to worry about "master" and "slave", "PIO mode" and all those things that make IDE a pain in the butt. So SATA does remove some potential bottlenecks.

I don't find IDE a pain in the butt, however PCI-e or x
causes instability and I don't need it or want it,nor do I need multicore processors,again my legacy gear conflicts
with those, however SATA is viable and is included on a number of industrial mobos. Including those I'm interested in and they do keep up each that I've mentioned
have socket 775, and the newest have PCI-e and support for multicore as well as ISA but where i get mad is there are no longer
any low cost replacements from the likes of Gigabyte,ASUS,MSI or whatever your fav consumer level
mass produced ______ is.

Keymaker · March 3rd, 2008, 10:52 AM

Don't ask me why. The same game was installed on two computers. One had a PATA CD drive the other a SATA CD drive. The PATA took forever! vs the SATA. I know there are several factors one could consider, but these two computers don't have any variables that I know of that would cause this. Other than maybe the MOBO. Hard drives are all SATA2!

Peter M · March 3rd, 2008, 05:06 PM

Well, browncat, the simple but hard truth is, obsolete technology does not get abandoned for no particular reason.

Aside from "make it such that 99% of the market find it useful", there are technical aspects like pin count. Legacy busses like ISA and IDE use a ton of pins, and you just can't put more than a certain amount of contact balls under a southbridge.

A couple of chipset generations further, even those extra signals are removed that let a mainboard designer add a stoneage bus through a discrete bridge chip.

Now, if you are this desperate about using IDE devices, get a SATA-IDE bridge. Problem solved. As for ISA bus, well that's been obsoleted a decade ago ... time to move on, really.

Said the industrial computer design engineer (software).

Keymaker · March 3rd, 2008, 05:35 PM

You know what they should do. Make everything with optical interfaces, then it would be all software defined. Problem solved.

Cmptr-Gy-Dv · March 3rd, 2008, 06:08 PM

most motherboards still have at least 1 IDE port, I still use all IDE CDrom and DVD drives, mostly because I think it's better to save the SATA ports for hard drives were it will make a difference over an IDE hard drive,

in short it's better IMO to save the SATA lines for hard drives

especially if your going to run a raid setup