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SATA vs IDE? (i think)

Look through your motherboard specs to see if it is mentioned, or look on the motherboard for the ports. The sata ports look like this.
sata-more.jpg

They're much smaller and nicer looking than the IDE ribbon cables, which is the only reason I can think of for someone to get a sata DVD burner at this point, because performance won't change much. (I'm waiting for the price to come down.)

Those are some really expensive drives. Good DVD burners can be had for about $40. (IDE though.) Newegg (for instance) has several for about $40. I have the popular NEC brand drive, and it's been working well for me. The only sata DVD burner looks like the plextor drive, which newegg has for $119. You should check tigerdirect and zipzoomfly too, I was too lazy. :)
 
I not sure whether to go the SATA root, it seems that SATA burners still have problems especially with the quality of the burn.
 
I've got one of those Plextors (PATA version). It's quite a nice drive, but the NV NForce 3 IDE drivers sure did screw it up. Burn-proof was kicking in every few seconds on DVDs. I've heard some horror stories about getting rid of them (can't, unless you reinstall Windows), though fortunately I was able to just roll them back to the MS driver. It might have something to do with all my HDs being SCSI drives, so there aren't any "critical" devices attached to the onboard *ATA ports.
 
zandor said:
I've got one of those Plextors (PATA version). It's quite a nice drive, but the NV NForce 3 IDE drivers sure did screw it up. Burn-proof was kicking in every few seconds on DVDs. I've heard some horror stories about getting rid of them (can't, unless you reinstall Windows), though fortunately I was able to just roll them back to the MS driver. It might have something to do with all my HDs being SCSI drives, so there aren't any "critical" devices attached to the onboard *ATA ports.

Knock on some serious wood here....

I've never had an issue with my nforce3 drivers.

I'd back up the OPs decision to stick with IDE. Unless you are really really concerned with cabling issues, there is no benefit to having a UDMA33 device on a sata header.... Waste of capabilities IMHO. :)
 
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