hi all, is it better to buy a sata burner or IDE? the only bad thing i can see about a sata burner is that it takes up a sata port, leaving you with one less HDD. is that the only draw back?

I've been asking about the same issue, and as far as I can tell, CD/DVD read/write speeds never even approach the upper limit of IDE, so there's no real need for SATA.

I feel the same way you do, I have 2 IDE ports anyway, I'll put the reader and burner on them, and keep 2 SATA ports available.

Thats true. Having both CD & DVD in the same unit decreases access times by up to a factor of 2. Check out the access times of a 52/24/52 CDRW drive and compare. Its why people have 2 drives. Side note: is anyone gonna build a SATA CDRW?

f61

SATA is better for cooling. That was actually the biggest design goal was to get rid of the big flat IDE cable that blocked airflow and replace it with a small round cable. SATA is also more forward compatible as you can carry it forward to upcoming motherboards that drop the IDE ports.

I don't see the problem with "losing" a SATA port. I have a MicroAtx motherboard and it has about a dozen SATA ports and I just need 2; one for the HD and one for the DVD.

IMO newer boards like the P35, their sata ports have port multipliers support built in (correct me if im wrong). so getting a sata dvdrw would guarantee you that you can "recycle" ur dvdrw for future rigs. and the availibility of port multipliers will allow u to have more ports than u can use. cheers

@ jadeite:

For a few dollars one can buy a round IDE cable and toss the ribbon in the garbage. That option has been around at least 3 years, but it wasn't useful until now...with the demand for cooling.

The biggest difference it the space that an IDE connector on the mobo, takes up. you can put several SATA ports in the same place. Really the only reason the get a sata dvd/cd RW, is if you don't have the IDE ports for it, or if you want to be able to move the drive to a new system with little hassle.

I switched from 2 IDE DVD burners to 2 SATA DVD burners and much prefer the small SATA cables to the IDE cables(and I was using the round ones). They were much easier to organize than the round IDE cables.

Price differences are narrowing, ide ports are disappearing, sata controllers are improving.... I'd have to think about it in my case. I typically have one spare sata port but use that occasionally for a 'guest' OS. I do have four ports available on my raid controller, but hate to waste the system resources required to use them unless I actually decide to set up another raid drive...

If I needed to replace just my dvd ATM, I'd probably go ide as the prices are better, my sata ports are limited... If I was building a new PC, I'd go all sata.

my 2p