SATA vs IDE truth about stupid manufacturers

Personally, I found it pretty inane. I have to believe there are legitimate technical reasons companies aren’t bringing out SATA optical drives. Most of the tech sector is incredibly competitive and if SATA were better for optical drives, companies like Lite-On, NEC, and the rest would be selling them. The guy that wrote this should have called a couple of the big manufactures of optical drives and asked them why they’re not making SATA optical drives. Present their explanations and if they’re stupid, point out how. Just saying people are stupid with out looking at what they have to say first is stupid.

I wrote a similar rant recently when trying to build all-SATA systems for two CAD workstations. I was literally shocked to discover I could NOT get ANY SATA optical drives in New Zealand at all. So I went digging on the intarweb and found the same thing.

There is no reason why opticals shouldn't be SATA - and it's that manufacturers are lazy fuckbags, pure and simple.

It might not seem like a big issue, but when you want 2 Optical drives and 4 SATA HDDs in the same box, and you don't want the opticals to share an IDE cable, then the lack of SATA opticals is a real concern.

I'm completely with Charlie on this one.

Yeah, I found the article to be about as worthless as a lot of threads posted around here....oh, wait... :wink:

There is little reason right now to change to SATA for optical drives.

Well, whoever makes a cheap SATA optical drive should make lots of money ahead of the others.

The author is an idiot. There is no need for SATA optical drives. You simply can't spin a cdrom fast enough to saturate the PATA interface, so lets not even mention SATA. Hell, most cdrom and dvdrom drives cannot even transfer data faster than ATA-33 speeds, let alone ATA-100 or ATA-133. Like I said, the author of that article is a flippin idiot.

i did not call them stupid, i copied and pasted the inquirers "title line"
and the link, its not my opnion on this issue.

lol actually u are right, but what about the blue ray technology and the other one ( i forgot the name of it) isnt the data transfer (atleast read) faster? tha regular cd rom one?

I Think That SATA For (Current) Optical Drives Is Kinda Pointless Considering That They Can Barely Take Advantage Of ATA/66

Good point. I guess we'll have to wait and see what the transfer rates are on those drives. Personally I'm holding out for holographic drives and skipping HD/BlueRay altogether. A DVD burner is still more than adequate for me. I find myself still burning more CDs than DVDs anyhow (movies are an exception of course). Let's hope that high-density optical storage also means high transfer rates.

I'm with you on this. The problem like joefriday said is that most optical drives just can't fill up the bandwidth. I don't know why they keep increasing the bandwith of these interfaces if they can't even saturate the previous generation. SATA drives and SATAII drives aren't even close to filling up a SATA bandwidth so DVD burners and whatnot aren't even going to be close. Personally I don't mind IDE except it puts more CPU load than SATA. Other than that though I'm still sticking with IDE until I need more bandwidth.

It's not about the speed, but about the fact that PATA is about to disappear. What if you buy a brand new high-end mobo some 6 months from now and when you want to connect your dvd burner you realise that you have nowhere to plug it in. That would suck.

Agreed, But If It Came To That You Could Alwayse Use A PATA Card

Yeah you could but I'd be pretty peeved if I went and bought a new computer, and then had to go buy a PATA card to boot. Not that I would buy and/or overlook the fact that it doesnt have a pata slot but it would just plain suck, although I don't think that manufacturers are gonna start making boards that dont have pata, otherwise no one will buy them, since there are no sata drives.

Another thing that's nice about SATA, which is a reason why I think they should move at least a few drives over to SATA, is that the cables are so much smaller and easier to work with. I just recently built a system and the hardest (well at least most annoying) part was dicking around with those damn pata cables, luckily we had some yellow round ones that we found a little bit later that we switched with, but screwing around with the cables is not something that I like doing.

To move ahead in the world of IT, we need to be a step ahead, with your kind of attitude, we will have to stick with PATA for as long as you are alive.. And we dont want that. :twisted:

2 words for ya: crosstalk and airflow.

"I don't know why they keep increasing the bandwith of these interfaces if they can't even saturate the previous generation."

one word:

RAID

(ok, technicly 4)

Well at least they called the manufacturer to ask why no SATA optical:

http://www.anandtech.com/tradeshows/showdoc.aspx?i=2770...

Turns out the OEMs are refusing to move on

Yeah for the sake of standardisation, convenience, simplicity and aesthetics
the sata interface and with it the cabling are all excellent reasons for going
with sata over ide.
the sata standards specify a max cable length of 1 metre and esata of considerably longer.
the old pata ribbon is ungainly, ugly and limited in application and length.
i run converters on my optical drives but i would rather have them built in
and they did cost a bit much.

Amen to this. If you look at the current generation of mobos comming out, ONE PATA port is all you're gonna get. How long will it take for that one to disappear from future mobos? Sure we will see them on Gateways, Dells, HPs, and the like. But for the build-it-your-selfer, PATA is going bye-bye. Ribbon cables suck, and "rounded" cables aren't THAT much better, though they do offer many advantages over their predesesors.

SATA is so much more compact and easy to use, and with today's home-built PCs housing more and more stuff (i.e. 2+ GFX cards, possible physics cards, fan controllers, light controllers, water cooling pumps/hoses/inc. hardware, etc, etc) SATA seems like a logical choice even if it is only included on the "entheusiast" hardware.

Funny you should mention those two things, because these are not problems that the current PATA devices suffer from either. My PATA optical drives function just fine, and my case stays cool as well, even with those big ole flat ribbon cables. :wink:

As for you alarmists spreading FUD about IDE channels disappearing soon, not a chance in hell. Mobo makers and chipsets producers will not drop IDE support until SATA optical drives become more mainstream than PATA. That's at least two to three years away. A single PATA channel is fine nowadays. With 750 GB hard drives and DVD burners, most people only need one optical drive and one hard drive anymore. If you whiners want two optical drives, then by a goddamned SATA hard drive. Wow..I just solved your problem. ONE IDE CHANNEL IS FINE!

I'm not saying I prefer PATA optical drives over SATA variants, I'm just stating what should be the obvious: Current optical drives will see no gains going to a SATA interface. Simple as that. What if all the optical drives switched over to SATA tomorrow, would I care? Hell no. It's fine. It's not like I'm going to boycott SATA optical drives. :roll: The author of that inquirer article is your geek equivalent of a Henny Penny. :roll:

The only thing is that they still can't fill up the bandwidth since it's serial and EACH drive gets the full bandwidth. I've never seen a single drive fill up that bandwidth or even come close to it. Even in RAID 0 the highest I've seen is like maybe 100 Mb/s.

there is already a sata optical drive form plextor in the market, probably very expensive but.... for thoose who need it   maybe a good choice.

http://www.plextor-europe.com/products/px-760sa.asp?cho...

For those worrying about PATA controllers being removed from boards, ask yourself how long ISA slots were still put on motherboards when they obviously should have been ditched because of PCI. What about serial controllers? When's the last time you used a serial interface for something? I use serial interfaces still today, but I'm probably in the fraction of percentages that do.

I doubt you'll see motherboards with no PATA controller for at least a year, at least that's my opinion.

Just want you to know I was referring to the author not you when I said that I thought the editorial was stupid. I try never to insult another poster. If I think someone is being ignorant or stupid, I don’t respond. There are plenty of other people on this forum that will take care of the ignorant.  

To continue your comparasion between ata-sata and pci-isa:

I remember when PCI first appeared, there were some 486DX and Pentium 1 mobos with 2 pci slots and 4 or 5 ISA slots. This compares to the first days of SATA, when higher-end mobos offered 2 integrated PATA + 2 Raid PATA + 2 SATA ports ).

Later the number of PCI slots increased to 3, then 4, while only two ISA ports remained ( In Pentium 2 mobos ). The last I saw an ISA port was on an early Pentium 3 mobo, don't remember which model. Athlon mobos never had ISA.

Today's mb have 4 or 6 SATA ports, with only 1 PATA remaining.

See the trend ?
PATA is at the end of it's age. The decline begun with first SATA HDDs on the market. Maybe only the huge current base of dvd burners is keeping it alive.
When BlueRay & HD-DVD will go mainstream they will most certainly produce them with SATA interface, and that's the end of PATA. One year from now maximum.

I for one would surely LOVE to have 50GB storage space on a disk and read it with 30M/second or more  

What about floppy disk interface,it is surviving today on many motherboards.
It disappear ? NO! :twisted:

The PATA will exist many years from now. 8)

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82E1682...

Cheaper and faster (PATA device):
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82E1682...

plextor has had SATA optical drives out for over a year....
you can get one here:
http://www.mwave.com/mwave/ViewProducts.hmx?PID=MM-DVDR...

actualy there are many (ok lol i counted atleast 2 :wink: )SATA/IDE to USB data "transferers" so u can plug i think 2 ide or 1 (or 2) hard drives/floppy(other pins) cd/dvd roms into it and have that old ide hd data transfered to new hds, or just get a good cd/dvd burner, and get that cable/kit and use it as a external dvd/cd burner, in my opinion that beats teh hell out of a external dvd/cd/hd drive, pricewise, i think they cost betwean 20 to $40 and in comparison some cd/dvd drives external ones cost that about 100 or so more than internal ones, i think these things would be very useful also for builders that get a mobo that does not suport lets say ide, but stil have an old ide drive which can be utilised in a way in that mobo.

to be honest i think that floppy drive suport on mobos(that is a connection in the mobo/not the usb posibility) will disapear in about 4 or 5 years for good.

Gee - why am I not suprised windows is the problem.... It never is a harware issue, it always is a MIcrosoft Windows Sucks - issue.... So what happens to SATA if VIsta sucks also?

vista will suck...er maby not visualy, and not dx10 wise , ok maby (suposedly) not security wise :wink: , bith my new build ill get windows xp home edition oem, and if anything i might get vista in a year or more after its release, i just dont like the fact that m$ spies on its customers, its just one of those things i hate about vista

why is it that mobo manufacturers are so quick to cut IDE out of their boards? its not costing extra money to slap 2 IDE ports on there. not everyone has SATA HDDs yet, so if youve got your one standard IDE CD drive, you cant use any of your IDE hard drives.

I agree.
And all mobos without 2 PATA connectors will also suck.

My thought is that the xp sp2 sata drivers don't support satapi, this article kinda eludes to it:

Concerns about ATAPI devices using SATA bridges

One good reason optical drives aren't switching to SATA is because of boot issues with SATA. I've heard theres some problems with it. Once Vista comes out which will natively support SATA, it will prompt optical drive manufacturers to switch.

But like others have said, there really isn't much of a reason to other than to finally get rid of bulky PATA cables.

You Could Use A SATA To PATA Adapter

Actually with port replication you can split the bandwidth up as well. You could have one sata cable going to an backplane with 2 sata ports quite easily and have even less wiring mess. The idea of less cabling and easier installation is much bigger than the simple fact that no performance gain will be made. I don't understand why there isn't a PCIe soundcard out there, I'd prefer a MB without PCI slots, Just give me something like 16x, 16x, 8x, 4x, 1x, 1x and 8 sata 2 ports and I'd be good to go.

I am currently using the Western Digital Raptor 74GB Serial ATA 10K RPM 8MB Buffer Hard Drive and Plextor PX-755SA Serial ATA DVD±RW Drive for over a year now. I love them.  

I understand the point of the gentelman form New Zealand. I have had the Plextor 716a for 18 months now and have some observations. Yes sit still is pricey, but I have found many fewer read errors on cdroms(very valuable when installing) and the only coasters on burning something have been my fault. That is competing with the PLextor 760A pata drive. Yes air flow is a big plus but the difference in quality is very noticable when you read or burn. It is probably due to having more money to spend on the transport mechanism. You find this in the DVD players more noticeably. I have a DVR-S7000 dvd player that is about 8 years old. It has an industrial transport mechanism and will play disks too screwed up for the under $750 DVd players of today to play. So I think that there is another issue for the OEM's. They will have to spend money to upgrade the transport mechanism to work with SATA. The PATA transports are too low quality to use with SATA.

cross talk happens to all pata cables, google it, it doesnt mean it wont work it means its not as fast. as for airflow it improves it, it doesnt make it go from hot to cold in a case. trust me, or google it.

"If you whiners want two optical drives, then by a goddamned SATA hard drive. Wow..I just solved your problem."

Isnt lack of SATA ODs the problem?

Cheap=sub $50. also one that accualy works, plextor as many of you prob didnt read dont work with many Mobos, if at all. Its in the reviews themselves or, google it.

I know what you meant. :wink: It's just that crosstalk so very minor, it hardly makes a difference. Of course SATA has its benefits over PATA, but they're not enough to sacrifice backwards compatibility at this point.

Just on that--you're dead wrong. I had an MSI 6330 K7T Pro-2A mobo that had 1 4x AGP slot, 5 PCI slots, and 1 ISA/EISA slot. It was a socket A/462 mobo, albeit was only 200MHz FSB (only accepted upt to PC133 SDRAM...).

As far as the article: I must say that marketing folks are really screwing up technological terms. The SATA interface follows the E-IDE specifications just as PATA does. They are both ATA drives and they both use the IDE/EIDE interfaces. The main difference is that SATA drives are wired in series, while PATA drives are wired in parallel.

Just like I hate the fact that there are "DSL Modems", I hate it when people say "SATA vs. IDE"--we're screwing up the whole frikin dictionary because we're lazy, uninformed bafoons who just want to screw others for as much money as is possible. Who cares where the money comes from--as long as the destination is my pocket, screw the whole universe!

Sorry...I've had a long, frustrating day. That's also one of my biggest pet peeves, but there is nothing we can do about it now. It bothers me that it has come to this only--I am not upset when you guys use the terminology, so disregard my useless rant and continue with what you were doing before  

I agree that vista should help switch most optical drives to SATA but currently very few PATA to SATA adaptors work. For those who have PATA hard drives that are complaining about the lack of SATA opticals, update the harddrives first, then complain.

oh ok.. in that case let me go burn all my PATA HDDs and buy all new drives for no reason...

That was for people building an all new system. If you plan to carry over your old PATA HDDs, why the hell would you be looking at a 965 chipset mobo? :roll: