Sata/ide

dazftw

Difference between sata and ide dvd drives/burners

Im guessing SATA are better?

Khannie

Nope. No difference speed-wise. As time goes by though, IDE will become a thing of the past. The downside is that it will take up an SATA port on your new motherboard if you get a SATA burner. It's much of a muchness either way.

Creamy Goodness

sata are better in my mind.

for the pure reasoning that you don't take lumps of your skin off your hands whilst trying to remove their power cable ala IDE power cables.

dazftw

So there basically the same just different wires? I would probably go with SATA cause the wires arent as big!

Stephen

Go for SATA if possible - a lot of new motherboards don't have any IDE ports, and those that do (at least on intel chipsets) only have them because the OEM added a chipset to support them. It won't be long before IDE ports disappear from all new motherboards.
My current motherboard, for instance, has 10 sata ports and 1 IDE port.

leeroybrown

Get the S-ATA drive unless you have a specific reason for needing IDE support. It will cost you very little extra and will be compatible with everything new.

The big irony in all of this is that most if not all of the extremely expensive Blu-Ray drives appear to be IDE units when pretty soon you'll need to pick a motherboard that specifically supports IDE to use them. Perhaps the drive manufacturers have an upgrade path in mind for people...

8T8

Yeah no real difference bar the cables and SATA is easier to manage in that area.

IDE is inching closer near deaths door as the optical drive manufactures have resisted SATA for so long because they design drives around the needs of the OEM system builders like HP or Dell.

Now that Intel's next line of motherboards due in a few months time have No IDE controller present at all their will be a much higher demand for SATA optical drives so the manufactures will in turn respond and start producing them en mass.

You can already see this with NEC & Samsung initial efforts.

dazftw

Yea I was basically going for the easy cable managment but wasnt sure if there was any performance issues with them!

Stephen

Performance is pretty much the same despite SATA's higher interface speed because the bottleneck is the rotational speed of the disks rather than at the interface - theoretically, SATA can be much, much faster than IDE, but they just don't make disks that fast yet.