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Serial ATA CD-Rom Drives?
OutRigged asks: "With Serial ATA hard drives starting to go mainstream, and being almost equal in price to their parallel equivalents, one would think we'd have Serial ATA CD-ROM drives by now. Yet wherever I look, all I see are PATA based CD-ROM drives. It's obvious that an optical drive will benefit little, if at all from using SATA, but why not switch for the sake of the cable size? CD-ROM drives are usually at the top of the case, and with the 1m limit in length, along with the small size of the cables, I see no reason not to use a Serial ATA interface in a CD-ROM drive."
buy a converter
"...today consumers have been conditioned to think of beer when they see a bullfrog..."
Is pretty simple... extra cost.
What about DVDs? I think I'm the last geek in the US without a DVD in his PC.
Blarf.
I honestly had not thought that far yet, but you are right. If one were to build a machine entirely built on SATA tech, there would be a problem of where do you connect the CD-ROM/R/RW, DVD/R/RW...or even IDE Zip drive for that matter.
It is probably getting hear time for these devices to start coming equiped with SATA connections. Which rasies and interesting question what if anything keeps them from coming with both connectors so they could be used with either IDE bus type. Other than price of putting the extra connector on the drive (and perhaps if needed embeding the converter from one connection type to another)
Power Corrupts,Absolute Power Corrupts Absolutely, leaving one person(group)in charge is absolutely corrupt.
Damn, but I love it when you get a nice server, plug in those SCSI drives to a backplane mounted in the drive bay, and they all auto-address.
It'd be nice if hot-swappable RAID5 IDE (complete with LED status lights) was worked out as a new standard for the home PC - one cable to the drive bay board, then plug in your drives without worrying about jumpers. It'd be even better if it used laptop-sized drives.
I wonder if economy of scale would make that affordable if all the next generation of PCs were sold that way?
You can now get a cdrom for 10, cdrw for 20... The cost of developing a new product in order to sell it for 5 more is just not worth it.
Mouse powered Chips, Open source Processors and Lego
Most of the SATA hard drives are still just parallel ATA with a bridge chip to convert them to serial. I imagine that once manufacturers switch to native SATA hardware, the reduced costs will send SATA to CDs, DVDs, etc.
...just ask your friendly neighbourhood floppy drive.
Do they make internal firewire drives?
I've never seen one, but I do have a card that'll do it. It has 4 ports going out the back, and one that's right on the card pointed towards the inside of the case.
"Derp de derp."
Hard disk drives costs more, and you can sell the SATA ones at a premium, and yet most implementations used a bridging chip - there aren't that many native SATA disk drives yet.
DVD writes may have a greater case for going to SATA - but if you are designing one you may not want to alienate the majority of people who may buy one. The market for this is so unsaturated that a buyer is as likely to be an ungrading from CD writers as one one who is buying a new system - many of which still does not feature SATA as standard - especially those DELL-type manufacturer who wants to cut every single cent possible from the cost of their components.
Basically to do a proper SATA switch you will have to split your market, or make yourself a niche player at this moment. And unlike Hard Disks, there are far more optical drive manufacturers around a very price sensitive market.
Most manufacturers I think will just make it as it is, and let people who really want a ribbon cable free system to use a converter.
http://www.neoseeker.com/news/story/2326/
the 1 device per channel for SATA.
Most motherboards that have onboard SATA usually have only 2 SATA channels + the usual PATA. A lot of those onboard SATA have built in RAID controllers. Right now mainly power users are buying SATA stuff. And buying 2 and RAIDing them.
So if they made an optical drive that used SATA, it wouldn't sell very well right now. You'll probably see them once they throw more then the usual 2 SATA channels on the board and it becomes a bit more mainstream then it is right now. Seems like a simple supply vs demand thing.
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Primarily, I was thinking about saving space on the case front when you want a minimum of three bays, and didn't even consider speed and reliability (I assumed equivalence to 3.5" drives)
Having said that, the speed issue would be less significant given the increased transfer due to striping, and I think it's possible that the higher failure rates for laptop drives could be due to the fact that they're normally in laptops... poorer ventilation and frequent jostling come to mind.
The throughput would increase with striping, but not latency. Still, a single 7200RPM full-size drive would be faster than two striped 5400RPM 2.5" drives, and far less expensive.
As far as reliability, yes, actually being in a laptop adds to that. But a hard drive has moving parts, and making parts larger generally means they'll wear better. In laptop drives they use smaller bearings, smaller read-heads, thinner spindle, and thinner platter. Something is going to give over time, and over significantly less time than on 3.5" drives. And frankly, given the price and capacity difference, I'd much rather see one or two slots for 3.5" drives than a dozen slots for laptop drives. 3.5" drives currently top out at 300GB @7200RPM or 74GB @10,000RPM. 2.5" drives top out at 80GB @5400RPM and 60GB @7200RPM. There are still a number of laptop drives on the market running at 4000RPM.
Lex orandi, lex credendi.
I thought I saw a slashdot article a while ago about a converter from PATA to SATA, i.e. a dongle you plug into your PATA device that exports an SATA interface. Perhaps I am halucinating, but, if not, this might satisfy your need.
And you said why dont they use laptop sized drives?
Easy, price. A Fujitsu hardrive, 146.8GB costs $614 dollars( NewEgg) A normal 160 GB (I couldnt find any 147 GB models) 5.25 SATA drive costs $147. ( NewEgg) Some law (moore's?) says that HD capacity doubles every year or something like that. The difference remains being ABSOLUTELY HUGE.
Somebody else mentioned cable size and for a couple of bucks you can pick up nice rounded IDE cables.
Mod Wisely.
I would expect to see SATA optical drives some time after I see motherboards with "native" SATA (meaning SATA which is built into the chipset, not an extra "on-board RAID" chip).
Under capitalism man exploits man. Under communism it's the other way around.
do you have anything to back that up with? i'm genuinely curious, as i'd like to upgrade to a SATA RAID setup sometime soon.
even assuming you can fit it in the slot, in which case you've probably got more important things to worry about...
I just did this with a 52/24/52x plex-writer, I've been a scsi man for the last 5 years and I wanted a cheap cdr (not a $200 cdr) to replace my 4x burner. $45 plexwriter + $25 2 port silicon image sata pci card + $20 sil ide->sata converter == $90, less than the $200 I would otherwise pay for scsi. It's not as cheap as I would have liked but I got what I wanted in the end.
I didn't want any excess processor load while burning on the fly. Funny thing, the performance is about what I'm used to getting from a scsi peripheral. I've been able to burn discs under heavy load without any of the coaster problems I've had with ide systems.