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why so few SATA optical options?

S

stonedwaldo420

Limp Gawd
Joined
Mar 30, 2005
Messages
505
Why is it that there is currently only one SATA optical drive on the market (and a crappy one at that, or at least the benchmarks seem to indicate that). I have run out of IDE ports and still want to add more optical drives. I have an IDE card, but I don’t want to deal with adding it and running the fatty cables straight through the middle of my computer.

When will we finally see SATA versions of all different drives from many manufacturers?
I want options!
 
maybe cause its not a huge issue these days, DVD's read fine off drives while playing......the only need i can see would be ripping/burning faster.
 
hungryduck said:
the only need i can see would be ripping/burning faster.
Click to expand...
Optical drive speeds are largely limited by physical reasons, not because of the interface.

I think it's largely just an issue of demand at this point. Most motherboards still have PATA interfaces and the only real advantage of a SATA optical drive is the smaller cable. With that being said, though, I do think we're going to start seeing quite a few SATA optical drives within a year.
 
I remember when Plextor made a big deal about optical drives... it was just a regular PATA drive with a SATA bridge attached to the end of it.
 
_Korruption_ said:
I remember when Plextor made a big deal about optical drives... it was just a regular PATA drive with a SATA bridge attached to the end of it.
Click to expand...
They eventually did come out with a native sata device, though, iirc. But in any case, it's because sata doesn't give any benefit to optical devices (aside from the cabling, of course). Even a 16x dvd (the fastest optical device) is only ~25 MB/s - they're on ata/33 or /66 for a reason. You don't even need an 80-pin cable to get full speed out of an optical drive. Not that I'm recommending it ;)

 
Plextor's newest SATA drive (PX-755SA) just came out. Supposed to be available the first part of April 2006.
 
Ya, I am not looking at SATA for the speed. It really is just because I have run out of PATA ports on my mobo. With two PATA hard drives, and two optical drives, I have no room for anything else without adding that pesky card.
However, the DFI gods blessed me with 8 SATA ports, and I have always wanted a 4 drive optical setup. Finally, I have had really bad luck with the shared buss architecture of the PATA cables when doing stuff on both optical drives (I usually get slow performance or errors). SATA seems to be the best way around this problem.
Maybe it is better now that the Plextor drives are native SATA, but the benchmarks I saw a while back for the plextor SATA had it lagging quite a bit behind most drives costing half as much.

That Rosewill adapter looks pretty sweet though. Does it slow down performance at all? (I doubt it would since I am using it on an optical drive).
 
Well, I don't have that exact Rosewill one, but I do have one of those adapting one of my older IDE drives into a sata drive, and I haven't noticed any significant slowing.

 
The economics plays a role in this, just isn't a market for them at the momemnt. People seem to be quite happy with their rounded IDE cables.
 
If I recall correctly, I think there were troubles with compatibility with the ATAPI protocol found in all modern optical drives. Either that, or there is/was a dearth of SATA controllers which supported that crucial protocol.
 
Well, hopefully that adapter card still works with optical drives. If it doesn't I suppose that I could always return it.
Either way though, it will be worth it. I have this "burning" desire to burn and rip DVD's at the same time (pun intended).
 
If your motherboard has a Silicon Images SATA controller, the Abit Serillel2 Adapter will let you convert your ATAPI devices (optical drives) to SATA. If you don't have a Silicon Images controller, you can use it to connect your IDE hard drives via SATA cables.

I've got a couple of them sitting in a closet from my old NF7-S's. PM me if you're interested.
 
Yes, i believe that the additional 4 SATA ports on my DFI are supplied by a SI chip.

I think i am going to go with the Rosewill RC-204 converter though since it is less expensive and available on NewEgg. It also claims to support ATAPI decoding.

Can anyone think of a reason why it wouldn't work with a DVD burner?
 
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