SATA dvd burner question

Fallschirmjager

Ladies and Gentlemen,

i am looking to buy a new drive for a brand spanking pc i am building

her eis the question:

it is sata based so should i buy a SATA dvd burner or can i get a much cheaper (by about 100 dollars) one that is ide based and some converter.

if i do what in your expert opinion is the good and bad points of either solution...

art

Fallschirmjager wrote:

Ladies and Gentlemen,

i am looking to buy a new drive for a brand spanking pc i am building

her eis the question:

it is sata based so should i buy a SATA dvd burner or can i get a much cheaper (by about 100 dollars) one that is ide based and some converter.

if i do what in your expert opinion is the good and bad points of either solution...

Never heard of a SATA DVD burner before but just because the Mobo uses SATA ports does not mean you have to use SATA Drives - the motherboard will still have IDE ports there somewhere, they are not legacy yet. (No such thing as an IDE to SATA converter by the way, they are different technologies).

The speed gained by SATA transfer is of no relevance to a DVD burner which already has a capped speed - it can only physically cope with a certain amount of data at a time, so I can't see the point in connecting a DVD drive via SATA really?

Fallschirmjager

art,

thanks mate...i will check to see if the mobo caters for it (i sure hope it does and after what u wrote i supect it will)

thanks again...just saved me 100 notes (or thereabouts)!

srdb20

Check out the SATA DVD burner on Komplett

Plextor SATA DVD


Check it out i have one myself, and you dont have to use the big IDE cables.

astrofool

what motherboard do you have srdb20?

i'm trying to find out if nForce boards support cd-rom on their sata ports atm

tba

art wrote:

No such thing as an IDE to SATA converter by the way, they are different technologies.

You can go backwards though!

Keep those old IDE drives in your PC.

sceptre

Fallschirmjager wrote:

can i get a much cheaper (by about 100 dollars) one that is ide based and some converter.

If it came to it and it turned out that your mobo didn't support IDE in any form (which has been said would be pretty odd at the moment for optical drives), you could always just get one of these and use the IDE DVD drive regardless.

art

This is all news to me!

Can't see the point though, at this stage of a SATA DVD drive. The max a DVD can burn is 16 speed (and that always will be the max) and IDE hard drives already fire data down too fast for burners, so firing data down a SATA cable is of no benefit in terms of speed or quality of the burn (compared to a sole drive set as master on IDE).

ie Assuming you have 4 SATA controllers on a board and two IDE - putting all your HDDS onto the SATA controllers means you've IDE controllers doing nothing for you... might as well hook up the DVD drive to the IDE port - as it will be the only drive on that port, there's no problem of contention etc. Plus its a well supported platform, I'd imagine some Burner software will fumble over having the drive on a SATA controller.

sceptre

art wrote:

I'd imagine some Burner software will fumble over having the drive on a SATA controller.

Not if it's written properly - the actual device should be pretty much transparent to the software which should let the OS sort all of that out, even if it has to use the equivalent of an ASPI layer or AHCI to do so (which it shouldn't). Anyone who writes an app to directly address hardware these days without a pretty good reason deserves a garden implement in the face.