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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.
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/
> What about DVDs? I think I'm the last geek in the US without a DVD in his PC.
No, I don't have one. Don't have any use for one. I do have a CD writer...
If software ever starts coming on DVD instead of CD, maybe I'll have to
get one, I'm not holding my breath. The CD is too standardized; it'll only
be replaced by something that's a *lot* better (i.e., holds a *lot* more).
In the early days of PCs, people would by incremental upgrades because
everyone who had a computer was a geek and wanted to push the envelope.
After the 1.4MB floppy, enough regular people had PCs that the next several
improvements (2.8MB floppies, remember those? What about LS120 SuperDisks?)
never caught on. The thing that will eventually replace the floppy, and
we're only *starting* to see this happen now, is the writable CD. That's
almost a 500-fold improvement in storage capacity.
The CD-ROM today is at least as standardized as the 1.44MB floppy disk was in
1996. I predict it won't be replaced, for most people, with anything less
than a 500-fold improvement in storage capacity (i.e., 300 GB), probably
twice that or more. Frankly, with networking getting to be the way it is,
there's very little reason to want a larger read-only drive than 600GB;
anything that large you just download anyway. Pretty much the only reason
to want a DVD drive is if you want to watch movies, but most people who
want to watch a lot of movies have a television screen they want to watch
them on, so they get one of those hardware DVD players. For those of us
who don't care that much about movies, or don't have to see them the very
instant they come out, VHS is still totally viable -- and necessary, if you
want to watch anything you or your friends or family tape, because nobody
seems to be buying DVD-recording video cameras. They cost too much I guess.
Now, read/write drives are another matter, but the writable DVD drives
and blank media cost so much more... the CD writer is the sweet price
point by a very wide margin still at this point.
Cut that out, or I will ship you to Norilsk in a box.