SATA optical drives?

JohnJSal

JohnJSal

Active Member
The book I'm reading (from 2006) warns against SATA optical drives because of compatibility issues, but I'm having trouble finding PATA drives on newegg. Or is PATA the same as E-IDE / ATAPI? Is IDE also the same?

Thanks.

Also, is it still the case that PATA is preferable for an optical drive?
 
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Get SATA, i love them. Nothing wrong with them, i havn't ever heard of compatibility issues. Im runnning two sata drives. Beats the heck out of having bulky IDE cables...

IDE is PATA, i do beleive.
 
The first sata dvd burner in the new build here has been quite reliable so far. Many vendors will now stocking more sata models since boards are going sata for the most part with most now seeing only one ide channel. The term PATA represents Parallel ATA while sata represent Serial ATA using a thinner single data cable for each drive.



The image above is a typical sata data cabled included in the retail carton a board comes in. Those are 7pin connectors compared to the 80wire/80conductor seen with a standard ATA100/133 drive.
 
PATA = IDE

I have two SATA DVD burners and I've never had a problem. They work fine for loading OS's as well.
 
Thanks again everyone. I guess at this point I can only hope that the parts I'm choosing will just come together and work for me. :)

But don't worry, you will all be blessed with my final parts list in another few days. ;)
 
StrangleHold said:
The IDE cable has 80 wires with 40 pins. It has 40 extra ground wires to add to stability
Click to expand...

40pin VS 80pin "Ultra" IDE Cables? Wha does that have to do with sata optical drives? :rolleyes: If I need a dictionary,


Ultra DMA (80-Conductor) IDE/ATA Cables
There are a lot of issues and problems associated with the original 40-conductor IDE cable, due to its very old and not very robust design. Unterminated [COLOR=blue! important][COLOR=blue! important]flat [COLOR=blue! important]ribbon [/color][COLOR=blue! important]cables[/color][/color][/color] have never been all that great in terms of signal quality and dealing with reflections from the end of the cable. The warts of the old design were tolerable while signaling speeds on the [COLOR=blue! important][COLOR=blue! important]IDE[/color][/color]/ATA interface were relatively low, but as the speed of the interface continued to increase, the limitations of the cable were finally too great to be ignored.
In the ATA/ATAPI-4 standard that introduced the Ultra DMA transfer mode set, a new cable was introduced to replace the old standby: the 80-conductor IDE/[COLOR=blue! important][COLOR=blue! important]ATA [COLOR=blue! important]cable[/color][/color][/color]. The name is important: the new cable has 80 conductors (wires)--it does not have 80 pins on each connector, though, just 40. This means that the new cable is pin-compatible with the old drive. No change has been made to the IDE/ATA connectors, aside from the color-coding issue (see below). http://www.pcguide.com/ref/hdd/if/ide/confCable80-c.html
 
StrangleHold said:
80 Conductor means 80 wires not 80 pins, it still has 40 pins. Read the last 3 lines in your copy and paste
Click to expand...

Where did I say "80pin"? :rolleyes: The most commonly used term is 80conductor/40pin that replaced the old 40conductor/40pin cables. Again you never bother to fully read anything. :rolleyes:
 
PC eye said:
Where did I say "80pin"? :rolleyes:
Click to expand...

PC eye said:
40pin VS 80pin "Ultra" IDE Cables?
Click to expand...

Right there :rolleyes:

But to add to the question, either will be basically the same. For the most part companies are moving over to SATA. I believe it was Seagate who no longer produces IDE hard drives anymore. Optical drives will soon follow. However, besides smaller cable sizes and being slightly easier to configure(IE no jumpers) there's no advantages. Most optical drives peak around ATA33 speeds.
 
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That's for sure! The sata dvd burner here seems no faster then the ide model on the last build. But the faster is certainly faster with a dual core cpu over a single core model. That carries the work load much easier rather then tying down cpu time.

One thing looked at while selecting a board with more then two pci slots was seeing 6 sata ports on a single ide channel board over others with two pci and only 4 ports. This allows for expansion there if I replace the present ide cd writer with a sata model.

When going for one of the new WD GP(Green Power) 1tb drives for storage I can move Vista to the second 500gb storage drive and leave the ide channel vacant for slaving drive for things like data retrieval from old cases. The GP for WD refers to the new energy saving feature in those large capacity drives as everything swings in the sata direction as the standard.

Sata 1 drives however did see jumpers on some models. Those also saw Legacy power connections along with the standard sata plugin. If you run across one of those the best setting is the default or removing the jumper entirely since that's drive mode not position on a cable as seen with ide type drives. The following image shows jumper information on one WD Sata1 model outlined at http://wdc.custhelp.com/cgi-bin/wdc...3RleHQ9anVtcGVyIHNldHRpbmdz&p_li=&p_topview=1

 
Even though the read/write speeds aren't much better with SATA drives, the big advantage is that they don't share the same cable/port, so you can be writing to many drives at the same time and it won't slow down or cause errors like multiple IDE drives do.
 
You won't load the data stream on the same cable since only one for each drive is the thought there. But you will see the same demand for power and data stream going through the memory on the way to the cpu.

The next evolution in sata would then see a benefit of hardware improvements to utilitize the sata bus more fully. Blu Ray is one gain over the typical dvd presently whether sata or ide. Working on cases without seeing any bulky iide cables? Even better! :D
 
PC eye said:
You won't load the data stream on the same cable since only one for each drive is the thought there. But you will see the same demand for power and data stream going through the memory on the way to the cpu.

The next evolution in sata would then see a benefit of hardware improvements to utilitize the sata bus more fully. Blu Ray is one gain over the typical dvd presently whether sata or ide. Working on cases without seeing any bulky iide cables? Even better! :D
Click to expand...
I was referring to IDE, where when you have two drives on the same cable theres a significant slow down when reading / writing to both drives at the same time.
 
Yes and in addition to that the cpu being made a work horse is where you will also see things get bogged down. The expression multitasking applies there. The type of media will also have to change in that sense as well.

Consider the leap from tape drives over cds when first introduced to make a comparison there. T_O_O summed it up quite well with the present ATA33 media we are all using on both ide and sata optical drives. A software installer will take the same amount of time for the same program on the old Socket A build as the present AM2 case due to the read/write speed limitations on the current media.
 
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