What do you mean most are SATA? On newegg, for example, they have 90 PATA(IDE) CD/DVD burners, but only 7 SATA burners...
No optical drive comes close to matching SATA speeds, nor do they even hit the highest PATA speeds. It's be a much better choice to get a PATA drive. There's no advantage to SATA CD/DVD drives, and they are much cheaper.
sata hard drives are faster (i believe the bus speed is 3gb, someone can correct me) and they're cheaper to boot
sata burners are the exact same as the ata versions, with a sata to ata bridge, so they're exactly the same, in some cases have more errors, and cost more to boot
either one's a better solution than external, tho, so if you have no ata ports free, then go with the sata
actually... bought a drive for my bros comp and it came... it was sata!
no biggie, there was an extra port.. windows installed in like 5-10 minutes!
that was a surprise. http://www.newegg.com/product/product.asp?item=N82E16827106047
thats the one, not that much more expensive is it?
personally, i think sata is easier to install... now screwing around with drive jumpers and slave/master crap.
As bobo said, SATA or PATA has no impact on speed with regards to CD-ROMs. A 16x DVD will be read/written at 21.13MB/s. Obviously, that's MUCH slower than even typical PATA speeds(133MB/s)