Another affordable SATA DVD burner

[Doom9]

With Plextor just being too darned expensive, I opted for a Samsung model back in the day.. the 16x model has now been superceded by the 18x model, the S183A.

Meanwhile, NEC, while giving me the usual "go away" line when I inquired about an SATA drive, seems to have warmed up to SATA after all and released the AD7170 - priced the same as its IDE counterpart, the AD5170 (or ND5170 if you buy it as a boxed model).

I guess I won't have to buy a box of Samsung drives now.. with Samsung bringing out a new drive so soon and NEC joining them, I'm hopeful that SATA drives are on their way of losing the exotic status no so far down the road.

[check]

are there performance benefits to SATA optical drives, or are they just useful in that they stick the final nail in the PATA coffin?

[CWR03]

are there performance benefits to SATA optical drives, or are they just useful in that they stick the final nail in the PATA coffin?
The latter seems more likely - most new motherboards only come with one EIDE now. The maximum read speed of the disks themselves has been reached.

[Doom9]

For optical drives, even the HD variety, you don't need the SATA throughput, but it's one less interface in your computer which makes it cheaper (if only unnoticeably) and there's one less component to screw up your system - and of course it makes the whole cabling issue a whole lot easier. So if you get a new box or need a new burner, make sure it's SATA (and make sure they don't charge you more.. those drives are supposed to retail for the exact same amount as their IDE counterparts).

[Sirber]

I don't see any benefits to SATA beside smaller cables...

[Doom9]

The typical response of the legacy people. If you bought a printer 6 years ago with only a parallel connector, you either have or will run into your next PC that has no parallel connector so you end up buying a connector.. if you had looked into the future and got an USB capable printer right away, you wouldn't have to worry about that and even back in the day the price difference was at best as much as an USB <-> parallel adapter costs today.
IDE is going away within a few years.. it makes no sense to plunk money into something you already know is going to be superceded. Those additional IDE chips that mainboard makers have to put onto their boards cuts into their profit.. they'll be glad to be rid of that extra cost as soon as they can and those that didn't see or refused to see this development coming will be forced to buy an adaptor or a new drive. Granted, it's not so expensive, but there have been plenty of other more expensive developments. If you buy a PC that only has AGP today, your GFX card upgrade options are limited, if you buy a mainboard with an old socket, your CPU upgrade options will be limited, if you buy a socket 939 platform, you'll be stuck with DDR-1 RAM, etc.
Getting rid of legacy isn't all about being better.. it comes down to future compatibility and mere convenience too. Would you buy a car without ABS, Servo steering, airbag, just a tape recorder, non electric windows, no central lock, etc today? Perhaps if you're into oldtimers but for conveniently driving around and for safety reasons those features make sense. You'll probably even get airconditioning even though it'll decrease your mileage, but during summer it's no pleasure to sweat your ass off when coming home from work.

[Sirber]

Of course of I upgrade I'll get the new stuff.
All I'm saying is speedwise SATA, PCIE and DDR2 are not that better.
Just new connectors to force people to upgrade...

[Pookie]

Yet Microsawft will prompt you for a 3rd party driver located on your floppy drive during installation :D

[Sirber]

Yet Microsawft will prompt you for a 3rd party driver located on your floppy drive during installation :DI removed my floppy drive long ago, since it's as fast as 56k and I haven't seen a floppy for years :)

[Blue_MiSfit]

Actually SATA drivers on floppy or slipstreamed onto an install CD are only necessary if you have a RAID. XP setup works fine with SATA drives, it just sees an IDE drive - at least thats how it works with SATA ports on the chipset. If they're on a controller chip like the Sil 3112 etc then you do need the drivers.

[Doom9]

The whole "driver windows doesn't have" is one of the few reasons Vista makes sense... Vista can get the driver from any kind of media, not just a device that has been deprecated almost a decade ago.

[dragongodz]

as Blue_Misfit said it would only appear you need a driver on floppy or slipstreamed if you want raid.

apparently some motherboards have a setting in bios to configure sata as standard ide. in that case windows xp will use standard drivers and is meant to work and install fine.

[check]

I believe it was meant during install - it will only accept drivers from a floppy.
As for WinXP working without needing SATA drivers: this would only true with a recently pressed copy of Windows. Every copy I've installed for my (extended) family has required me to load the SATA drivers via floppy. The most recent case was six months ago.

[Blue_MiSfit]

Ever since I've been using SATA, I've had a disc with SP2 slipstreamed - so maybe that has something to do with it. I think it's also something that the motherboard chipset has to support.

As I said, I know for sure that a SATA chip (as opposed to SATA channels that are integrated into the chipset) definitely require drivers to be understood by Windows.

And yes, loading drivers off a CD, flash drive etc is a really long overdue feature. I think I'll stick with XP for awhile though. I like my idle RAM usage under 300MB thank you very much :)

~MiSfit