It is not a secret that all recently manufactured mainboards have only one IDE slot, and this is not really a good news for people with a big stash of burners. In fact, the main issue related with s-ATA controllers is that they are suited purposely to manage hard disk drives (HDD), and not burners.
What is the problem? Simple: optical drives requires ATAPI protocols to work correctly, whereas HDD doesn’t need ATAPI at all. So, controller manufacturers are not implementing these protocols in their hardwares. Consequently, s-ATA controllers have an excellent performance with HDDs but can have a lot of problems to work with optical drives.
Besides a less chaotic cabling, however, currently s-ATA optical drives have no real advantages compared to IDE ones. An example can be found on an article published at The Inquirer, in which Asus DRW-1814BLT s-ATA burner was compared with an IDE drive.
Thanks to GristyMcFisty for letting us know about this news.
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This message was edited at: 03-05-2007 04:46
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