Sata vs. IDE for Optical Drives

[Catt]

Hi,

I am soon to order the parts for the PC I am intending to build but have got stuck on this one area.

Are there any inherent advantages to using a sata optical drive over an IDE one?

I know that IDE cables are a lot wider and can impede airflow if badly managed but is there that much of an impact?

Essentially I am asking if in people's opinion it is worth paying extra for a sata drive over an IDE one?

Cheers, thanks in advance

 

[miahallen]

No real performance benefit to SATA.

 

[burn-e86]

pretty sure that PATA for optical maxes out at either 33 or 66, well below the limit of 133.
I prefer PATA since it means i can stick more sata hdds in

 

[mkaibear]

No inherent advantages at all.

 

[qrhetoric]

Currently there are two disadvantages to SATA:

More expensive
May not be able to boot from drive (I think i saw this on newegg)

That being said, I can't wait for these to be resolved. I would love for ide cables to go away. In the meantime, make sure you set your jumpers correctly, and if you can, but a rounded ide cable.

 

[outlw6669]

No real advantages to sata over pata yet.
If you have a newwer MB you shoulden't have mutch of a problem booting from one.
You can get a sata dvd burner for about the same price as a pata one now and that would be my recomendation.
As you say, they have smaller cables and they are more future-proof.

 

[p05esto]

I have the $40 Liteon SATA DVD drive from NewEgg. Works It's nice to turn of IDE support in BIOS. Faster??

You do have to get you SATA drivers installed off that Floppy or slipstream image when installing OS like W2K or XP.

 

[Sagekilla]

I'm pretty sure we won't see any 'performance' boosts unless you're writing 2 DVDs at once. Even writing two CDs at highest speed on my rig, there's a noticeable slow down in speed. But, I doubt we'd see any huge performance gains until Blu ray/HD DVD rolls around with high speed media.

 

[cdonato]

Currently there are two disadvantages to SATA:

More expensive
May not be able to boot from drive (I think i saw this on newegg)

I've got both a SATA DVDROM & a SATA DVDRW, you can boot from both without a problem, otherwise I wouldn't have been able to setup windows on the new build. I got my stuff from newegg & the price difference was negligible for both drives like maybe 25-30 bucks in total. The main benefit to SATA drives is unlike PATA that shares a bus between every drive on the chain SATA is single chain so each device gets full bus speed making usage more reliable & faster.

 

[I]

I have the $40 Liteon SATA DVD drive from NewEgg. Works It's nice to turn of IDE support in BIOS.

No, there's nothing nice about disabling this feature, it's a pointless thing to do unless you had a specific, unique problem with your particular motherboard.

Not that it really matters, sure you "can" do it, but it's akin to spreading urban myths to suggest it's in any way "nice".

Given that there is no performance advantage to SATA on opticals, that they cost more, and that there is only an imaginary difference in airflow quality from using SATA vs (properly routed) PATA cables, the main criteria for choosing one over the other should be which controller has an open channel/position, how using one or the other will effect adding other drives to the system.

 

[Catt]

Thanks all for the advice - its been very helpful. Given the very small price difference I think I'll go with SATA. Also the IDE socket on the motherboard I'm looking at (MSI P965 Platinum) seems to be in an awkward position.

 

[arima]

haha. but for something like a optical DVD/CD rom drive, it seems overkill to hook up SATA to it. I just use a round cable

 

[The_OGS]

Just to let you know, I have problems with my SATA DVD.
DVD-ripping programs don't know what to make of it...
It is rip-locked to 2x speed! I had to install an old Pioneer DVD-Rom (on the IDE controller) to get normal DVD rips @ ~8x or 10x speed.
But at least my Plextor burns great,
Regards

 

[Pintail]

Hey. If you could get a SATA drive for a reasonable price, go for it. Not just for the cable issues and airflow, but also from the fact that alot of new mobos only have a single IDE channel. Ideally, every drive in a system should have it's own channel for the greatest speed (if using a combination of drives simultaneously). In my case, my only IDE channel has a DVD burner as master, and my CD burner as a slave. From what I've read in Maximum PC Magazine, I could burn CD's on the fly twice as fast with the opticals being on their own channel , which SATA optical drives would allow...

That being said, actual drive performance would be better looked at by the manufacturer's stats on drive buffer sizes and overall performance.

My thoughts anyways

 

[sunangel]

I can't believe no one here knows the difference between IDE and SATA. IDE is a shared channel between two devices, EIDE-ATAPI Optical drives or hard drives. For SATA, each device gets its own channel.

As an example, try ripping two dvds at the same time on the IDE channel. both drives should max out at about 8x. however, do the same on the independent SATA channels and depending on the read speed of the drive (and the dvd disk) both drives could hit the max read speeds.

the ideal situation is to have data flowing between different channels on SATA. don't rip both disks to the same hard drive (channel) at the same time. rip on disk to one hard drive and the other to another hard drive. same go for writing also. caution - make sure buffer underrun is active. if you have a lot of data moving through the south bridge (i.e. hard drive traffic, internet/download traffice, pci devices, etc.) it will reak havoc on burns, just not as bad as if your using IDE optical drives only.

 

[Pintail]

I can't believe no one here knows the difference between IDE and SATA. IDE is a shared channel between two devices, EIDE-ATAPI Optical drives or hard drives. For SATA, each device gets its own channel.

Alot of older mobos has 2 IDE channels, Primary AND Secondary, allowing for 2 drives to be independently channelled. But yes, I thought I kinda implied what you said. 8)

 

[I]

I can't believe no one here knows the difference between IDE and SATA. IDE is a shared channel between two devices, EIDE-ATAPI Optical drives or hard drives. For SATA, each device gets its own channel.

As an example, try ripping two dvds at the same time on the IDE channel.

The question is not whether others know the difference, which I suspect they do. The question is why you would have put two DVD drives you wanted to rip from simultaneously, on the same PATA channel in the first place.

Remember, the question was not "how should I hook up 4 PATA devices". Without there being 4 PATA devices, there is no need to have two rippers on the same PATA channel. On some boards there is now only one PATA channel (2 positions) but even so, there was no mention of two, simultaneous PATA DVD drive ripping either.

FWIW, much hypothetical is given about there being a potential issue having simultaneous device access on PATA, but are you really ripping two DVD at once THAT often? Better question might be, is this an important factor in use or would it not really matter? Maybe your needs are different but when I rip a DVD I don't really care, the system is still usable and the disc stays in either way until I had something else needing that drive, which becomes less and less likely if I'd been ripping the discs so they're on a HDD somewhere instead of a disc I'd need to put into the drive.

 

[The_OGS]

are you really ripping two DVD at once THAT often?

LoL - not me! That's silly. Who would try to rip two DVDs at once?
Buddy said he had his DVD burner master, and then his CD burner slaved.
He's probably got a 'special' 3-sheep CD burner, or else it would be expendable and could just be removed.
It is when you have an IDE harddisk, and then a burner slaved to it, that you cannot burn from that harddisk effectively.
Two burners are about the only thing you COULD master/slave (because typically only one would be in use at a time, and they do not talk to each other).
L8R

 

[sunangel]

The question is not whether others know the difference, which I suspect they do. The question is why you would have put two DVD drives you wanted to rip from simultaneously, on the same PATA channel in the first place.

dude, with blockbuster' and netflix's unlimited rental you want to get them back to them as quick as possible. with two burners, you ripp the movies and have them back in the mail the same day, in most cases within a couple of hours. in fact, with blockbuster's total choice, you have a maximum of 8 movies to rip in a day. who wants to be waiting around for one burner to rip, then burn, then rip, then burn, etc. daul rip and dual burn two dvds at a time is faster than doing them one at a time.

 

[halcyon]

Is that legal?

 

[jnjkele]

Is that legal?

NOT!!!

 

[sunangel]

i think we all know its illegal. yet, its been acknowledged and there is nologer a need to hide the truth. there is no need to use gaming as an excuse for powerful computers to rip dvds and transcode them to divx, xvid or whatever.

so, feel free to talk about what you do. yes, its illegal. but, even though TG Forumz doesn't promote dvd ripping, the majority of its patrons do.

 

[KTev]

The only real advantage to a SATA optical drive is that many boards already have dropped oneP ATA controller and chipsets like Intel's don't even support PATA any more. I would guess SATA would be the way to go if you want to keep using the drive in future systems.

 

[I]

The question is not whether others know the difference, which I suspect they do. The question is why you would have put two DVD drives you wanted to rip from simultaneously, on the same PATA channel in the first place.

dude, with blockbuster' and netflix's unlimited rental you want to get them back to them as quick as possible. with two burners, you ripp the movies and have them back in the mail the same day, in most cases within a couple of hours. in fact, with blockbuster's total choice, you have a maximum of 8 movies to rip in a day. who wants to be waiting around for one burner to rip, then burn, then rip, then burn, etc. daul rip and dual burn two dvds at a time is faster than doing them one at a time.

Frankly, I'd feel the hassle of going through all that exceeds the gain from having a few more movies ripped, and it still doesn't address what real loss you'd have if it took a few more minutes to rip.

Nobody is THAT busy, multitasking means you can do other things while the discs are read, maybe even non-computer things.

If you've got 8 movies just watch 'em, it's not like the one who has the most rips wins a prize.

 

[The_OGS]

Look, a DVD rips to your harddisk in ~12-15 minutes.
If you wanna do 8 in one day (must be quite a library!) go ahead - that would still take only ~2 hours. One-at-a-time!

who wants to be waiting around for one burner to rip...daul rip and dual burn two dvds at a time is faster than doing them one at a time.

LoL :lol: And what unfortunate harddisk are you inflicting this torment upon?
Quality is everything! You will be watching the results long after you forget how long it took to rip...
L8R