Native SATA Drives

[jen4950]

Are there any native SATA hard drives out on the market right now? Howabout Optical?

 

[qdemn7]

Plextor PX712SA is the only optical SATA drive I'm aware of. I'd love to be proven wrong. Says mid-June availabilty, here it is July, nothing yet.

 

[rottweiler]

Seagate Sata's are native.
I got a couple 200GB drives, and they are great.
Although I don't think you could actually notice much of a difference.

 

[E4g1e]

Most "SATA" drives - hard-disk or optical - actually use PATA interfaces with a bridge chip to convert PATA signals to SATA. I'm afraid that the Plextor optical drive that's mentioned earlier in this thread is such a "legacy" PATA design with a converter chip.

Seagate SATA hard drives are, IIRC, the only "native" SATA drives on the market.

 

[jen4950]

Most "SATA" drives - hard-disk or optical - actually use PATA interfaces with a bridge chip to convert PATA signals to SATA. I'm afraid that the Plextor optical drive that's mentioned earlier in this thread is such a "legacy" PATA design with a converter chip.

Seagate SATA hard drives are, IIRC, the only "native" SATA drives on the market.

That's the reply I was looking for- thanks-

 

[dainthomas]

I thought the 74 Gig Raptors were, too?

 

[leukotriene]

I thought the 74 Gig Raptors were, too?

They're not, all Raptors are still bridged. The 74GB model adds a form of Command Queueing
(ATA-4) seen on certain other IDE drives, but not NCQ which requires a native SATA drive to support, as well as a supporting controller.

The only other Native SATA 3.5" drive on the market is the new Maxtor MaXLine III with the 16MB buffer.