First Look At S-ATA Optical Storage Drive

An anonymous reader writes "CD Freaks has a first look at a S-ATA optical storage drive. Although several S-ATA HD's have been released lately there have been no signs of S-ATA CD-RW and DVD-R/DVD+R drives. S-ATA seems to be the solution for the data transfers involved with 16x DVD recording and the fast 52x CD-RW drives. However there seem still to be some compatibility issues. "

Comments

What is taking so long?

[supraxnet]

It has been a long time now without any major advancements in "easy" removable storage. Why has there not been a cheap and easily removable/transportable storage device with storage capacities that match the times on the market yet? There is a huge demand for something larger then 4 or 8 gigabytes, and the current optical storage we have now has been shown to be short lived.

Re:What is taking so long?

[aldoman]

Because of the enviroment. People don't scratch hard drives and expect them to work. However, you will be ridiculed as a conman if a few scratches hurt your optical media.

Also, people don't like caddies. We need an advancement in error correction before we can think of using even higher density optical media.

Re:What is taking so long?

[2nd Post!]

What huge demand?

Every time we have an article on DVD+/- media, or BluRay, or something, we have all these moaners complaining about optical compatibility; they are avoiding, rather than buying, due to some mystical compatibility issue.

If your system can read and write it's own disks, that's all you need! If you can't read someone else's disks, why exactly would *not* buying a DVD+/- drive change that?

I've been using DVD-R for 1 and a half years now, and it's great. Backup of my home directory (which is only 12gb) is easy and convenient.

As per lifetime... my data becomes obsolete within a year, and then it's time for another backup. If you want serious data backup, you'll need a good sized hard drive array and use some data center type software, not optical drives.

Re:What is taking so long?

[Naffer]

I've got some 18 year old 8mm tapes that I was planning to convert to DVDs later this year, but the possibility of my discs failing has me quite worried. Unfortunatly, magnetic tapes don't usually last more then 25 years, so I'm forced to do something about it. I'd really like to get them off analog media and onto something that doesn't degrade. Its a shame that I'm going to have to worry about my discs falling apart much sooner then the 18 years these tapes lasted.

Re:What is taking so long?

[Ozric]

Or maybe pick up a cheap DLT drive on ebay.

I have personaly thrown DLT tapes across a datacenter, dropped them from high tape rails and kicked them across the drop floor. But they still work just fine. They are harty little buggers I am convencedd the only way to beak them is with a hammer or inceneration.

Re:What is taking so long?

[2nd Post!]

Another usable solution. But the speed and price of DVD-R now ($150 for the drive, $1.5 for the media) , it's cheaper to use DVD-R and get a nice sleeve, and back up much faster, than tape.

AFAIK, tape still runs at $1/gb, while DVD-R is now $0.20/gb

Re:What is taking so long?

[silas_moeckel]

Forgeting the cost of drives (they are insignificant to the TCO on a datacenter backup solution) I can get Ultrim 2 tapes for about 60 bucks a pop for 200 gigs uncompressed with a streaming write speed of 30MB a sec or 100 GB an hour compared to 4gb in 8-10 minutes for an 8x DVD-R or 24 - 30GB and hour. The DVD's do get me random access and a sligtly cheaper media except for the volume (it's a 50 DVD Hatbox to store the same as one tape) I would say tape wins for a datacenter and optical at a normal 1-3PC home. That backup speed means a lot in a datacenter wich is why some places are moving to HD only backups and others to HD based buffering and some to a mixed format that provides the speed of HD based backups and the reliability of tape by running full backups out ot tape and buffering differentials only to disk.

Re:What is taking so long?

[jandrese]

Who's talking about datacenter backups? This is about home backups, and the cost of the drive is significant when you're buying it for yourself. There's no way I want to backup a few TB of data on DVDr-s, but I also don't want to spend $60 per tape to backup my personal home directory. It's all about the right technology for the job.

Re:What is taking so long?

[WuphonsReach]

(ones that I know off-hand) AIT-2 (50Gb uncompressed) - $60/tape, $1000/drive AIT-3 (100Gb uncompressed) - $60/tape, $3500/drive Yeah, tape prices suck for the home, mostly because the drives with decent per-gigabyte tape prices are expensive.

Re:What is taking so long?

[Anonymous Coward]

Strap one to the alternator in your car and see if it still works after a 30 mile journey.

Re:What is taking so long?

[Anonymous Coward]

A wise man once told me that backing up data with tape is like backing up the Marines with poison gas.

Re:What is taking so long?

[Anonymous Coward]

hmmm you can find LTO-1 Ultrium 1's for $37 (100GB uncompressed) so that is $0.37/Gb

tigerdirect / buy.com

ahh don't you love the smell of FUD in the morning?

Re:What is taking so long?

[Anonymous Coward]

Why has there not been a cheap and easily removable/transportable storage device with storage capacities that match the times on the market yet?

You can buy a USB to IDE convertor that hooks up to any laptop hard drive, and appears as a standard USB mass storage device. Laptop drives are pretty small, and have enough capacity for most uses.

There are also USB and FireWire hard drives, but I don't know how large they are.

Re:What is taking so long?

[Anonymous Coward]

"some mystical compatibility issue?" The poster misses the point of compatibility. Perhaps the poster is too young to remember the Beta vs. VHS tape battles. Definitely too young to remember 8-Track, etc.

Don't buy when you can't be sure what you're buying will be supported in the near future!

Most people want something they can use to "archive" - not something for simple system backup. If a user spends the money and makes he effort to make archive copies of all those old Beta tapes and 8-track music, they want to be fairly confident that 5-10 years from now they'll still be able to read the archived stuff without having to dig out old "has-been" technology. Many people do not believe that DVD-R has evolved to that point.

Re:What is taking so long?

[2nd Post!]

Haha, FUD? DVD-R is still cheaper per GB at $0.20. $37 of DVD-R media is 150gb or so of data, and it's still (probably) faster than tape.

Compatability Issues

[Allen Zadr]

I found the most interesting part (the second half of the article) was that SiiG has "no interest in supporting optical drives", when the reviewer was having problems using this drive with a SiiG controller.

I guess I can now confirm that I have no interest in buying anything from SiiG.

Re:Compatability Issues

[DarkBlackFox]

For the majority of users, there is no need to use further bandwith on optical drives. Even my 52x32x52 CDRW only runs at ATA-33. Why spend money to develop an ATA-150 model if it doesn't even use that much bandwith to begin with?

Even 52x CD burning is only 7,800 kb/sec. I can see where a SATA drive would be helpful for high speed DVD burning, but even then, if they even developed an ATA-133 model, that should suffice for a number of years.

Don't get me wrong, I love to see newer/faster/better, but I know why companies would want to create a faster transfer method for a device which barely uses the capability of the bus provided anyway.

Re:Compatability Issues

[DarkBlackFox]

Er.. that should read "but I don't know why companies would want to create a faster transfer method..."

It's easter, and I just woke up...

Re:Compatability Issues

[Allen Zadr]

Well when you have two devices on the same bus, both competing for bandwidth, it's possible to run into the dreaded, buffer underrun. SATA, IIRC, doesn't have this problem.

Of course, for most of us the buffer underrun is a Max CPU utilization issue, but that's beside the point.

Re:Compatability Issues

[Hektor_Troy]

One word: Wirering.

The P-ATA cables are what? 4 inches wide and not very flexible (as in, you can't really make a good 90 turn across the cables width). Compare that to the S-ATA cables that are probably an inch wide, can be longer and are easier to place out of the way.

And they don't block airflow as much.

Re:Compatability Issues

[pknoll]

Last I checked, rounded IDE cables were still half the price of SATA cables. Since they're available, arguing for SATA because of its cable design is rather a moot point.

Re:Compatability Issues

[CatOne]

True, the bus speed increase isn't going to improve performance.

The main thing is cabling, and ease of installation. With PATA you have these big, wide cables, and you have to deal with master/slave issues (who hasn't experienced the "computer won't boot when you install a new drive problem, at least once).

With SATA it's not an issue.

Only problem with SATA right now is that XP doesn't support it in the OS, so you have to download drivers to a floppy (a FLOPPY!) and hit F8 during boot to check for 3rd party drivers. I wanted to have a machine with no floppy (been the case on my Macs for YEARS) but I had to run to Fry's and pop for $9 so I could install the OS on a SATA drive :-P

Re:Compatability Issues

[rgmoore]

I assume that part of the reason for wanting a SATA optical drive is convenience, rather than need for the increased speed. Since there's every reason to think that SATA is superior for hard drives, you know that you're going to want a SATA controller. It would be really handy if you could plug your optical drive into that same controller without needing a kludge like a SATA to parallel ATA adapter; that way you'd need only one controller for all your drives. Hence it would be nice to have a SATA capable optical drive, even if it's not strictly necessary.

Re:Compatability Issues

[urmensch]

It might be nice to get rid of your old school P-ATA connections entirely when you buy a new motherboard. Not necessary of course, but I wouldn't mind, especially if it cost me less..

Just a thought.

Re:Compatability Issues

[Jeff DeMaagd]

Don't get me wrong, I love to see newer/faster/better, but I know why companies would want to create a faster transfer method for a device which barely uses the capability of the bus provided anyway.

Not all users are solely concerned with speed. I'd get it just to clean up the cables.

I end up using one optical drive per channel anyway, because I've found that I do get noticably better speed on optical-to-optical copies rather than making both drives share a channel.

Re:Compatability Issues

[moreati]

Rounded IDE is a hack. the length of the cable is even more limited than normal because of increased cross talk (interference between signal wires). Also, in my experieince, the rounded cables are even less flexible than the ribbons.

SATA can go longer distances, at faster speeds, with less bulk, more routing flexiblity & it works for all drives (PATA is too big for 2.5" drives). Additional it's electrically safe for hotplugging. As a bonus we finally get rid of those damn molex connectors.

At the moment it's more expensive, that will change.

Where SATA will of most use is in compact form factor machines - mini/nano-itx, micro-atx, laptops, high density rackmount storage servers etc.

Re:Compatability Issues

[Clockwurk]

Perhaps cable wiring isn't a good example, but motherboard wiring sure is. Routing 4-6 leads is much nicer than the 40 required for the p-ata spec. S-ATA connectors don't have exposed pins that can get bent or broken, and doesn't have the cable at a right angle to the connector allowing closer spacing.

Re:Compatability Issues

[knewman_1971]

What I do see being a huge problem is that Windows XP setup doesn't seem to support SATA devices without using a driver floppy to allow it to recognize SATA ports as a Mass Storage Controller. -- an annoyance for people who have discarded their floppy drives long ago.

Not a problem. Make your own unattened install, and add the SATA drivers. Been doing it for a year now, and it's a wondrous thing.
Check out MSFN.org for more info.

My unattended install (which has grown to a DVD) installs WinXP fully patched, DirectX 9.0b, Office 2k3 (customized to my settings), all of my apps except Firefox, and tweaks my system out. It does it in 45 minutes, with only 1 user intervention (carving drives). It mtakes a couple of days to set it up initially, but once you're done, the maintenance is very low.

Re:Compatability Issues

[DarkBlackFox]

Why spend the money on a new drive (since we all know new technology always costs an arm, a leg, and your first born), when old you can adapt.

I've used a number of these things, and they work wonders for cable management. I have an MSI K8T Neo, and run exclusively SATA, with 1 SATA hard drive, 1 PATA hard drives, and 2 PATA optical drives, all through the SATA bus.

Re:Compatability Issues

[ThisIsFred]

For the majority of users, there is no need to use further bandwith on optical drives. Even my 52x32x52 CDRW only runs at ATA-33. Why spend money to develop an ATA-150 model if it doesn't even use that much bandwith to begin with?

I know, what is it with that? The fastest single IDE drives I can find can't even show 40MB/s sustained transfer rates (I'm not talking about manufacturer's claims, I'm talking about what I've found with actual testing). So technically, spindle speed, head seek speed and density has to go up before we even reach the transfer rate that ATA-66 is supposedly capable of.

OTOH, maybe it's a cost-saving issue? If the de facto interface is SATA-150, it will be cheaper to produce controllers for those devices.

Re:Compatability Issues

[Drakino]

For the majority of users, there is no need to use further bandwith on optical drives. Even my 52x32x52 CDRW only runs at ATA-33. Why spend money to develop an ATA-150 model if it doesn't even use that much bandwith to begin with?

For the same reason we now use USB mice, keyboards and printers. SATA is the evolution of the internal storage interface, so we should migrate everything, not just the devices that can take full advantage of it. A USB mouse never even gets close to taking full advantage of the USB 1.1 bandwidth. But having all the devices on a new bus means you can simply the connectors the computer has. I could care less if my next PC has a PS/2 or parallel port since it has been years since I have used either port. And I'm glad my Mac lacks legacy ports. They have no use beyond complicating the mainboard.

I'm hoping for a dual layer DVD burner on SATA for my next PC system this summer.

Re:Compatability Issues

[Ironica]

For the majority of users, there is no need to use further bandwith on optical drives. Even my 52x32x52 CDRW only runs at ATA-33. Why spend money to develop an ATA-150 model if it doesn't even use that much bandwith to begin with?

In this case, it seems that the folks who didn't have an interest in supporting SATA optical drives were the SATA controller manufacturers. It's all well and good to say there's no reason for a manufacturer to go to the trouble of making an SATA optical drive, but if they actually do bother, it's pretty lame for the controller manufacturer to say "we're not interested in supporting it."

Re:Compatability Issues

[sjgm]

Only problem with SATA right now is that XP doesn't support it in the OS, so you have to download drivers to a floppy (a FLOPPY!) and hit F8 during boot to check for 3rd party drivers.

When I installed Windows XP on a new machine with a SATA hard drive I didn't need any drivers. The machine doesn't have a floppy drive either.

I understand that you only need to load additional drivers if you want to use SATA RAID functionality - and that would probably be an issue on all OSes (for the moment, anyway)

Re:Compatability Issues

[Halfbaked Plan]

Or maybe it's a marketing issue. "The geeks all seem satisfied with the hardware they presently have. How can we convince them they need to spend lots of money on an expensive first generation of something new?"

Re:Compatability Issues

[L0rdJedi]

OMG! This looks like the greatest utility ever. As soon as I have a chance I'm going to try building one for Win2k.

Re:Compatability Issues

[drinkypoo]

You should never had had any interest in buying anything from SiiG in the first place. Their drivers are abysmal, their documents are in engrish and frankly their hardware is craptacular to begin with. Avoid SiiG at all costs. I lost a 150GB stripe due to a driver error.

Re:Compatability Issues

[Jeremy Erwin]

Does the PowerMac G5 use a SATA optical drive?

Re:Compatability Issues

[SylvesterTheCat]

One word: Wirering.

One more word: spelling.
Sorry... couldn't resist.

Re:Compatability Issues

[drinkypoo]

PATA cables do suck but they are nowhere near 4 inches wide. Even a 50 conductor narrow SCSI cable is less than four inches. (In fact it looks to be about three inches or less - for reference, a US Quarter Dollar is about 15/16" wide.)

Now you're right that SATA cabling is a significant advance - too bad it's a significant advance in price. The cable I got had molded connectors so it probably didn't cost nearly as much more to make than the PATA cables I've had, and with the newer grounded PATA cables (for UDMA66+) I bet the SATA cables are actually cheaper to make, though they still cost more.

Consumers would be better off if SATA had never been invented and we had native firewire drives instead. And I'll keep saying that until enough other people take up the call and the damned things start coming out. If there were drives, you can bet your sweet ass that more motherboards would have 1394 boot support.

Re:Compatability Issues

[jandrese]

Well, don't forget that you might have two drives on that ATA chain, both of which have buffers so you don't have to sit on the ATA channel for the entire write cycle. I think it will be very difficult to fully saturate an ATA-100 or ATA-133 controller, but you can probably burst more than ATA-66 can handle.

Of course with all of the caveats you get with ATA, I doubt you'll see any performance improvement either way. Oh well.

Re:Compatability Issues

[Grant29]

As with all new technologies, I usually try to wait for the tech to mature a little. Sometimes it's hard to resist getting some of the cool bleeding-edge products, but I like to wait until they are cheaper and more robust. I'm ready to go SATA, but I'd like to get harddrives an doptical drives with the native SATA instead of having to get an adapter.

--
Retail Retreat

Re:Compatability Issues

[golgotha007]

Only problem with SATA right now is that XP doesn't support it in the OS, so you have to download drivers to a floppy (a FLOPPY!) and hit F8 during boot to check for 3rd party drivers.

you're not kidding! i couldn't believe that WinXP wouldn't allow me to load the drivers off a CD. i don't even have a floppy drive!
i borrowed one from a friend and ended up doing the install.

after, i whip out Fedora Core 1 and begin to install it on my new SATA hard drive. everything installs and boots up nice and smooth.
but then i notice that my secondary drive works (/dev/hda) which is IDE, but i cannot enable DMA on the drive with hdparm.
that's odd, right? so i boot back up into my WinXP install and check the hardware device options on my IDE drive. hmm, it says here that DMA is enabled.

so, when using my new SATA drive in linux (using both 2.4.22 and 2.6.5 kernels), i am unable to turn DMA on my secondary IDE drive, but with WinXP it's no problem.

anyone have an idea what's going on here?

Re:Compatability Issues

[ajs318]

Serial ATA connectors are horribly flimsy, since the "socket" goes into the "plug". I know because I recently ordered and commissioned a beautiful dual Xeon 2.8GHz server with two serial ATA drives. To get Linux onto it, I had to add an old-style parallel ATA drive just temporarily. When unplugging the extra drive, I accidentally snapped off the Serial ATA connector on one of the hot swap bays, and had to order a replacement connector PCB. At least it was a connector PCB and not the drive itself :-\

Re:Compatability Issues

[Ironsides]

A-ATA cables are about 3/8 to 1/2 of an inch wide and about 1/8th thick. you can twist the round and round without losing much length, and they do 90 degree turns easily. I got a new computer back in october with SATA, this is how I know. And the regular length S-ATA DATA cables are about half that of the P-ATA cables. Only thing is they need a power adapter in most computers since the plugs are different. Best thing about the ATA cables? Impossible to put them in backwards. I still have the problem of P-ATA cables going in the wrong way.

Re:Compatability Issues

[OutRigged]

Last I checked, rounded IDE cables were still half the price of SATA cables.

Apparently you haven't been shopping around for IDE/SATA cables lately. Here's a quick search from Newegg for both IDE and SATA cables:

Rounded IDE Cables
SATA Cables

There's almost no pricing difference, unless you're buying a SATA cable over 18 inches; but $4 USD for a 36 inch SATA cable doesn't sound too bad, considering you can't even do that length with IDE.

Re:Compatability Issues

[Anonymous Coward]

Where SATA will of most use is in compact form factor machines - mini/nano-itx, micro-atx, laptops, high density rackmount storage servers etc.

Until they BURST INTO FLAMES. Do you own any SATA?

Re:Compatability Issues

[micker]

I dont know where you shop, but at my store, SATA cables are 1/3 to 1/2 the price of rounded IDE's....

Re:Compatability Issues

[ckaminski]

Geez, how old are your PATA cables that you can't get notched connectors?

Re:Compatability Issues

[ErikZ]

Wow, thanks for pointing this out!

Re:Compatability Issues

[knewman_1971]

Win2k follows pretty much the same steps. That's how I got on the UI bandwagon. Good luck!

Re:Compatability Issues

[eofpi]

Laptops and rackmount storage servers already tend to make use of backplanes or backplane-style connectors. From that, it's not difficult to route the wires internally to a more ventilation-friendly location.

Re:Compatability Issues

[eofpi]

Um, there are native firewire drives (or at least a specification for them). It's called Serial-attached SCSI (for those of you who don't know, firewire is a serial implementation of SCSI).

Re:Compatability Issues

[moreati]

I don't dispute that. What ever effort and ingenuity is required to make a backplane carrying 80 conductors / 2 drives (PATA 133). It will be cheaper and simpler to create the same backplane with 4 conductors/device.

Re:Compatability Issues

[drinkypoo]

If SAS were firewire there would be no need for SAS. From what I hear SAS will let you run SATA-2 drives as clients so I kind of doubt that it's going to behave like firewire.

Firewire and SCSI are similar, but from what little I have read on the subject, not identical, neither the command set nor the signaling (the latter is obvious.)

Re:Compatability Issues

[ave19]

The only drive in my system is a SATA 250gb, and I installed XP pro on it without any gymnastics... what is this "f8, 3rd party drivers" you speak of in XP?

(Asus P4P800 Deluxe MB)

-ave

Re:Compatability Issues

[CatOne]

I booted from the XP CD, and it says "cannot find any storage on which to install XP. If you have drivers for this storage reboot and press F8 during the boot process."

So I did, and it worked. XP was released in 2001, before SATA drivers were available in the OS. As such, my CD has no drivers for it. It doesn't matter whether the BIOS can see the drive, it matters whether XP can write to the drive. In my case, it could not, unless I loaded them from floppy during the boot process.

Did you boot from an official XP CD and install it fresh on a blank drive?

Re:Compatability Issues

[CatOne]

What's the date on your XP CD? I have an "original" one -- From November/December 2001. Perhaps you have a newer CD?

I'm not gonna fork over extra coin to Microsoft to get an SP1 rev'd CD, so I have to get SATA drivers from the vendor because my CD most certainly doesn't have Seagate SATA drivers on it.

Re:Compatability Issues

[sjgm]

I've got an original XP CD as well, no SP1 included.

It may be that the Intel chipset on my motherboard is supported while some others aren't. It's a Intel ICH5R southbridge, fairly standard on a 875P-based board, so quite common.

dead after 2 comments

[rokzy]

mirror please?

Re:dead after 2 comments

[archonit.net]

Text from site as follows:

Recently we have been given the opportunity to take a look at one of the first S-ATA drives that is under development. The drive we received was a test model and will probably never ever reach the market. It was still intresting to see this new development and we took the opportunity to make some early tests. From our tests it seems that current available S-ATA controllers are not yet ready to be used with optical storage drives and we expect that this will improve when more S-ATA chipsets will be released. S-ATA will be the follow up of the current ATAPI/IDE drives that have dominated the hard disk and optical storage market for years. The technology brings easier to attach and smaller cables, no more master/slave settings, theoretically more speed and hot swappability, meaning you can replace the drive will the computer is on. The coming time we will probably see more releases of S-ATA drives but expectations are that large OEM orders from the likes of Dell and HP will speed up the process of the development in the end of 2004. Market expectations are that the entire market will be S-ATA in 2007, according to our sources. Check out here our first look

Ah well, ah well...

[Faust7]

there have been no signs of S-ATA CD-RW and DVD-R/DVD+R drives.

And as the site appears to be Slashdotted (or close to it), there will continue to be no signs.

Plextor has a SATA DVD+RW

[kraemer]

Poster didnt bother to look around. Plextor has some SATA DVD+RW love in the pipe:
http://www.plextor.com/english/products/712 SA.htm

Re:Plextor has a SATA DVD+RW

[Allen Zadr]

Your link is quite usefull

Does anybody have any early reviews on this model? Does this one have problems with SATA controller cards like the model in the article?

Re:Plextor has a SATA DVD+RW

[Anonymous Coward]

The Plextor drive has not yet been released so it's not actual on the market.

Re:Plextor has a SATA DVD+RW

[shfted!]

It's a plextor machine. I know it's not very cautious, but I've had enough spectacular experience with Plextor to buy their stuff on blind faith. It doesn't get better than Plextor.

A solution??

[dFaust]

S-ATA seems to be the solution for the data transfers involved with 16x DVD recording and the fast 52x CD-RW drives.

Since when have optical drives been needing more bandwidth than PATA can offer?? A friend of mine has TWO 52x cd burners setup on ATA 100, and can burn full speed on both of them simultaneously. So, um, how exactly do SATA optical drives solve anything? (note that I am all in favor of SATA opticals, if for no other reason than the cabling)

Re:A solution??

[Allen Zadr]

When both drives on a single bus are active, there are sometimes bandwidth issues that can lead to the hated buffer-underrun.

Although I fully admit- starting MS Word will (Max CPU) kill a disk record before just raw HD access.

Re:A solution??

[Lumpy]

if your drives have "burn-proof" you dont worry about that.

hell all but the absolute cheapest CDR's and DVD-r's have burn-proof in one form or antoher nowdays...

maybe that $29.00 Foogiatek 62X burn drive down the street might be suspect as to not have that capability.

I have on a SINGLE Pc at work with 2 ATA-100 connections to handle 4 drives ... 4 52X burners that can burn 4 discs at once without even a fart. SCSI is the source hard drives, andthe machine is pretty unuseable when the 4 disk burn is going (Except for when it asks for a disk in a driveto be changed for a new blank)

but I havent burned a coaster due to buffer underruns for over 5 years now....

Re:A solution??

[bhtooefr]

My KHyperMedia 52x24x52x has "Seamless Link" or something like that, and while it was $39, the next week OfficeMax had it free after rebate.

Unfortunately, it appears to have a nasty habit of killing the secondary IDE channel (but not primary, even when plugged in as the only device), and then soon killing the i810's graphics on my Trigem Cognac (don't ask...) Another of the same model in the same order ON THE SAME MODEL OF BOARD didn't do that...

Re:A solution??

[Afrosheen]

Ok, two points here.

Number one, burning under windows vs. burning under linux sucks. Particularly with the new 2.6 kernel's ide burning features..no more ide-scsi emulation, so less overhead. I saw 2 to 3% processor overhead during my last 1x dvd burn. :)

Number two, fifth rule of hardware building: never put burners and hard drives on the same ide channel, if you can help it.

Re:A solution??

[ProfessionalCookie]

Although I fully admit- starting MS Word

That's awesome! Admitting you have a problem is the first step to recovery! :)

Re:A solution??

[dFaust]

By both drives, what are you referring to?? I mentioned two 52x burners... do you mean "both" as in two of those? Or as in a 52x and a hard drive on the same bus?

A 52x drive will reach a max speed of under 8megs/sec... so if you mean burning two 52x cd's on a single bus or burning a single 52x cd with the hard drive on the same bus, either way you're only talking ~15megs/sec -max-. Nowhere close to ATA66's max specs, let alone ATA100 or ATA133. And while I understand that being on the same bus leads to the need for devices to take turns talking, that happens fast enough that the burner's buffer can easily handle the penalties.

I think most buffer underruns are due to the hard drive not being able to keep up for whatever reason.... whether it's because it's just not fast enough or because it's being accessed by multiple resources at the same time, or maybe the files being burnt are severely fragmented. If the drive can't keep up, it can't keep up... taking a device off of it's channel isn't going to help, since the bus is nowhere near being saturated.

Just my two cents :)

Re:A solution??

[Allen Zadr]

Yes, that's the fifth rule of hardware -- because of the limitations of IDE. SCSI has NEVER had that limitation, and SATA will not have that limitation either.

Re:A solution??

[code65536]

Not if they're on the same IDE cable.

Why not Firewire?

[OG]

I understand that something needs to replace ATAPI. It's done it's job well, but there are better technologies. But why wait for SATA when it seems there are already options available? If BIOS manufacturers would all allow booting from a Firewire device (do any currently) and MBs would all put Firewire onboard, it seems that things would be set. It allows for easy daischaining out of the box, it doesn't have the upper limit of devices that SATA does, and it's really fast. I didn't appreciate just how fast until I downloaded my music collection to my iPod. So what am I missing? Is it a licensing issue? If so, what about USB 2.0? Does that still use the CPU, causing a slowdown, or is all processing done on its own controller?

Re:Why not Firewire?

[CatOne]

PATA and SATA are generally used inside the computer, USB/USB2 and Firewire are generally used externally (i.e. cable connected).

Not sure of all the details/exactly why, though PATA and SATA are both (significantly) faster than Firewire (even Firewire 800).

USB2 is 480 Mbit/sec, Firewire 800 is 800 Mbit/sec, PATA is 133 MByte/sec, SATA is 150 MByte/sec (so both nearly 2x Firewire 800).

Re:Why not Firewire?

[slittle]

and it's really fast.

Unless FW1600 is out yet, SATA is faster. Firewire is 400, 800 and 1600Mb/s (afaik). SATA is 150MB/s, with 300MB/s due out mid-2004, and 600MB/s in 2007.

it doesn't have the upper limit of devices that SATA does

SATA is a port, not a bus. You get one device per port, period. No more master/slave bullshit.

Re:Why not Firewire?

[dan_sylveste]

>> Does that still use the CPU, causing a slowdown, or is all processing done on its own controller? I have one 250GB USB2-disk connected to my Centrino laptop, and whenever I use the disk, CPU-load increases to 30-50%. Is Firewire better?

Re:Why not Firewire?

[FullCircle]

True, but how many single, non-scsi drives do you have that can constantly transfer over 400Mbits per second?

The drive manufacturers keep looking for a faster interface, but they haven't improved their real-world transfer speeds much since Ultra 66.

Re:Why not Firewire?

[TheRaven64]

Unfortunately, the one point rather defeats the other. When was the last time you used a single device that could transfer more than 400Mb/s? What about 800Mb/s? 800Mb/s, it's as fast as ATA100. When was the last time you saturated an ATA100 channel (it doesn't count if it was saturated by the controller not being able to interleave messages to different devices properly, resulting in one being starved, only if the drive could produce data faster than the channel could consume it). If SATA supported multiple devices, then the extra bandwidth might be useful (you could plug three hard drives in and have them run at full speed without saturating the bus). Since it doesn't then FireWire gives you more speed than you need right now (and the option of more in the future when it's needed, since FW1600 and FW3200 are both in the pipeline) and the flexibility that you can plug multiple devices into a single port if you don't need all of the bandwidth for one of them.

Re:Why not Firewire?

[TheRaven64]

I seem to remember saying something similar a little over a year ago.

Re:Why not Firewire?

[mduell]

The WD Raptor and Maxtor MaxLine II can both transfer faster than 50MB/sec, sustained. See storagereview.com

Re:Why not Firewire?

[evilviper]

Wow, I thought I was the only one around here that was advocating firewire drives.

What most people don't apparently know is that Firewire is actually an implimentation of SCSI. By switching to Firewire drives, we're essentially getting the advantages of serial SCSI (and a chunk of the Fibre Channel market too).

You didn't mention that Firewire is bus powered, so no more of the power cables required by SATA. Plus, you could seriously reduce the complexity of PCs.

Just imagine, instead of Parallel, Serial, PS/2, USB, et al, you could just have firewire everything, and that would be all. A firewire Keyboard/Mouse may sound like overkill, but I've found USB to be pretty lowsy at doing the job, so I'd welcome any change.

In fact, another significant issue that would address, is what will be the successor to the serial port. USB is nice, but I've never seen any USB terminals, so we're stuck with RS232 for system administration for the time. With the added bandwidth, there could be actual progress in computers... something we haven't seen in a long time. You could have graphical firewire terminals. Instead of just text, you could have multiple fully-graphical sessions over firewire on the same box. Firewire is hot-swapable, so both centralized computing, and system administration tasks would work out wonderfully.

Another of the great advantages is that ALL hard drives will automatically be external hard drives. No need for a case, power adapter, or chipset to convert the interface from IDE to firewire. That would be very very nice.

So what am I missing? Is it a licensing issue?

I can't imagine how. I think it's just a matter that computer manufacturers aren't willing to take ANY risks at all. Replacing ATA with SATA is a no-brainer, and since nobody designing these things has a brain, it's a good fit for them. It has nothing to do with how well it will do the job.

what about USB 2.0? Does that still use the CPU, causing a slowdown, or is all processing done on its own controller?

Well, USB2 DOES require a lot of CPU power, but that's the least of the issues. USB doesn't handle multiple devices well, and only a fraction of it's theoretical max is usable, so firewire is much faster.

Re:Why not Firewire?

[evilviper]

PATA and SATA are generally used inside the computer, USB/USB2 and Firewire are generally used externally (i.e. cable connected).

Not sure of all the details/exactly why

That's because there is no reason why... It's just arbitrary.

Some of the first firewire cards sold had a firewire port on the PCI card that could only be accessed from inside the case, so it was obviously designed for use with things like firewire hard drives internally.

About the only one that has a reason is PATA. You can't really use it outside a computer due to cable lengths, lack of sheilding, and inability to hot-swap. Other than that, any of them could be used both inside and outside the case.

Speed is a non-issue at this point. If speed was an issue AT ALL, we'd be using SCSI.

Re:Why not Firewire?

[evilviper]

The WD Raptor and Maxtor MaxLine II can both transfer faster than 50MB/sec, sustained. See storagereview.com

Well, that would just be a reason to use Firewire 800, rather than the older, slower firewire spec.

You don't know of any drives currently using more than 100MB/sec do you? Didn't think so.

Re:Why not Firewire?

[Anonymous Coward]

SCSI Ultra-320 (320MB/sec) has been around for a few years.. I picked up a U160 controller and drives not too long ago for a reasonable price.. and holy crap is it faster than anything ATA has to offer, especially when you start talking about more than one device on a bus (ATA is a blocking bus, can't start operations on another device until the previous device has finished). Not to mention the 10k and 15krpm disks get helluva throughput.

Future Outlook

[9812713]

I think that dispite the fact that many manufactures can not decide where technology is going, they should be making the standard.

Good example is DVD formats, DVD+R, -R, -RW, +RW, RAM (2x 4x 8x... I havent seen much development in 8x media, tho the drives have been out for about 4 months). In order for any format to survive, we need the pioneers to force the standard to be adapted, and only then can the industry move forward.

Hard Drives are the same way, I haven't seen any drive trying to change from the "standard" magnetic technology. Sure some are Trying different ideas, to reach that 1 terabyte drive and some trying holographic technology. (Story is dated back in 1996 -- http://www.businessweek.com/1996/16/b347193.htm)

People are relying on the Push of technology to drive their home computers, office computers, and Heck, most cars come with a better computer then what I am running.. So why not push all this new technology.

Re:Future Outlook

[Gogo Dodo]

In order for any format to survive, we need the pioneers to force the standard to be adapted, and only then can the industry move forward.

Unfortunately, lots of companies think they are "pioneers" or "a leading manufacturer" and they have different opinions so you get the mess that is DVD formats. There is no one "pioneer" in the DVD formats.

Re:Future Outlook

[Bombcar]

Actually, there is only one Pioneer. :)

Computer Builders may soon rejoice!

[Vandil X]

I think SATA-based optical drives will be a huge boon to people who build their own PCs, especially those who use AMD processors and/or overclock various elements of their systems.

The reduced cable clutter alone will improve airflow over RAM and around the drives themselves.

What I do see being a huge problem is that Windows XP setup doesn't seem to support SATA devices without using a driver floppy to allow it to recognize SATA ports as a Mass Storage Controller. -- an annoyance for people who have discarded their floppy drives long ago.

But, as with all new technology, we'll see how things turn out in the coming months. Hopefully, this will make an official appearance on the first x86-compatible mobos with PCI-Express slots.

Re:Computer Builders may soon rejoice!

[Anonymous Coward]

SATA reduces size of the cable, but increases number of cables. You can put two devices on PATA cable, but only one device on SATA cable.

Only SATA 2.0 will solve this problem, but it's still a couple of years away.

Re:Computer Builders may soon rejoice!

[O]

I don't think anyone who builds their own computer puts more than one device per PATA channel if they can help it. It's just not worth sharing bandwidth between devices.

Re:Computer Builders may soon rejoice!

[ImpTech]

Except with optical drives on modern controllers, sharing the channel hardly matters. I always shared the second channel before I moved to SATA/SCSI disks and realized I had a PATA channel doing nothing.

Re:Computer Builders may soon rejoice!

[Frnknstn]

I beg to differ. Assuming a standard motherboard, with 2 PATA channels, and assuming a minimum of one HDD and one optical storage device as standard on a PC, any upgrades to the PC means that the channel will be shared.

Unless you can think of a reason to throw out an 80gig HDD just because you bought a new 120gig.

And that is ignoring the far-future technology known as '80-connector cables'.

Re:Computer Builders may soon rejoice!

[Ironica]

SATA reduces size of the cable, but increases number of cables. You can put two devices on PATA cable, but only one device on SATA cable.

And two SATA cables are still much nicer than one IDE cable...

Re:Computer Builders may soon rejoice!

[Anonymous Coward]

I find it funny you try and combat hot processors by intoducing a new hard drive controller technology. But you are right, SATA is just a part of the equation.

BTX form factor has volumetric spaces for components to ensure optimal air flow through the case. It also has a much more efficient power supply specification.

Also, Intel is planning to make the next generation of Pentium chips based off the Pentium M architecture meaning much reduced heat for about the same performance.

SATA has more streamlined cables that less obstruct air flow.

The next generation of computers will be smaller, quieter, and more efficient. It's about time we lay to rest a standard created in the era where processors didn't have heat sinks and the only cooling was the fan in the power supply.

Re:Computer Builders may soon rejoice!

[orkysoft]

An 80-connector cable is used to enable ATA-66 and over, with a 40-connector cable you're limited to ATA-33. It has nothing to do with the number of devices on the bus.

Re:Computer Builders may soon rejoice!

[Jeff DeMaagd]

Except with optical drives on modern controllers, sharing the channel hardly matters.

I found it does.

I was copying a CD between two optical drives on the same channel, the best it could do was 12x, at 16x it would have to stop several times to reload the buffers. When I had each drive on its own channel, the buffers stayed full at 16x the whole time. My DVD writer doesn't write CDs faster than 16x.

Re:Computer Builders may soon rejoice!

[Jeff DeMaagd]

BTX form factor has volumetric spaces for components to ensure optimal air flow through the case. It also has a much more efficient power supply specification.

The problem is that BTX introduces nothing that can't be introduced on ATX instead.

My Compaq worksation is an eATX case with three cooling duct-like zones.

The card cage (PCI, AGP) has its own fan.

The power supply has a 12cm fan that also draws air directly across the hard drives.

The memory, chipset and CPUs have its own third duct, with one intake and one exhaust fan, and the heat sinks don't have a fan bolted to it. Interestingly enough, the RAM slots run parallel to the air flow, unlike a lot of motherboards.

Re:Computer Builders may soon rejoice!

[Anonymous Coward]

And that one IDE cable easily reaches up to the next 5 1/2 bay up from it. 1 cable is still better than 2.

Re:Computer Builders may soon rejoice!

[Ironica]

And that one IDE cable easily reaches up to the next 5 1/2 bay up from it. 1 cable is still better than 2.

I simply don't agree. Two cables the size of a CAT-5 ethernet cable are still easier to use than one which is flat and two inches wide (or so).

Sure, that cable *can* reach up to the next bay, and in my computer it does exactly that. But it's a biotch getting the drives in and out, and getting the cable routed up there properly, and so on. And chance forbid your drives should have their IDE ports on different sides, such that the cable has to traverse a *horizontal* direction too....

Re:Computer Builders may soon rejoice!

[Frnknstn]

Yes, but did you ever wonder why ATA-66 and over are only availible on an 80-connector cable? Could it be that by doubling the number of wires, you could double the number of devices able to transmit without collision? Like, for example, doubling the number of devices on a channel from one to two?

Re:Computer Builders may soon rejoice!

[orkysoft]

No, by doubling the number of wires, the noise gets reduced so the cable can run at ATA-66 and up.

Re:Computer Builders may soon rejoice!

[Frnknstn]

... So by doubling the wires in a Cat5 cable, it could run faster?

Re:Computer Builders may soon rejoice!

[orkysoft]

Perhaps it would reduce the interference enough to allow for higher speeds, or longer distances.

Mirror

[frumin]

Text from the article:
Recently we have been given the opportunity to take a look at one of the first S-ATA drives that is under development. The drive we received was a test model and will probably never ever reach the market. It was still intresting to see this new development and we took the opportunity to make some early tests. From our tests it seems that current available S-ATA controllers are not yet ready to be used with optical storage drives and we expect that this will improve when more S-ATA chipsets will be released. S-ATA will be the follow up of the current ATAPI/IDE drives that have dominated the hard disk and optical storage market for years. The technology brings easier to attach and smaller cables, no more master/slave settings, theoretically more speed and hot swappability, meaning you can replace the drive will the computer is on. The coming time we will probably see more releases of S-ATA drives but expectations are that large OEM orders from the likes of Dell and HP will speed up the process of the development in the end of 2004. Market expectations are that the entire market will be S-ATA in 2007, according to our sources. Check out our first look here.
From the thread:
We came into posession of one of these "experimental" CDRW drives and thought it might be interesting to have a look at it and share our findings with the forum. Our best information at this time is that this drive will not be released any time soon. It was under development for a large OEM customer of LiteOn, who decided they were not interested in the drive. So if LiteOn does release it, it will be probably sometime in 2005. LiteOn does not have any firm plans at present for any other SATA drives that we know of. As long as there are IDE ports on motherboards, there's not much demand for this drive. So this drive is mainly just a novelty at this time. But it may give a clue or 2 about the direction we can expect CDRW to be headed. The drive's model number seems to be similar to the recently announced SOHR-5238S which is slated to replace the revered 52327S burner. However we have other info that suggests the 52A8S may have a different chipset than the 5238S. Untill we can open up a 5238S and look inside, we cannot know. The first thing that becomes obvious with this drive is that SATA controllers do not like it. Our source of info tells us that it seems to work very well with chipset-based SATA controllers, and not very well with PCI-based controllers. I have an onboard SIL-3112 controller (PCI-based) and also a SIIG PCI SATA controller card (also SIL-3112 chip). The drive will run on both of these controllers, but there are deffinite problems with firmware flashing and Kprobe scanning. I was able to flash firmware on the SIIG card, but not on the onboard controller. Kprobe causes the entire PCI bus to freeze up if you try to access the drive, not a pleasant experience. LTNFlash will read the firmware on either controller, but not write F/W except on the SIIG card. Whether these issues are due to drivers or BIOS on the controllers is anyone's guess. Another observation about the SIIG controller: Here's a reading curve at full speed on the SIIG card; What's interesting is that the drive did not actually slow down during this read, and the disc was a near-perfect CDR. So there appears to be some very strange bottleneck for data that is looking like a drive slow-down. Confirmed this oddity in DVDInfo: also, I was getting very high CPU usage readings on the SIIG card, running upwards of 40% but only in CDSPeed, not on my system monitor. So, I decided to put the drive on the onboard controller and here's the result: (much better) Again, this is the exact same SATA chip, with slightly different BIOS. I tried a number of different versions of drivers on the controller, even the driver form the SIIG card, but could not resolve the issues with the LiteOn utilities. I noted that on the OB controller, CPU usage is reported as normal, and burst rate measurement went from 8 on the SIIG card to 19 on the O

Re:Mirror

[base_chakra]

So the conclusion for all this is that in the near future, do not expect SATA controllers to support any optical drives, except the chipset-based controllers, and then only the Intel chip has been confirmed to work.

That's quite a generalization based on such limited experience with SATA optical drives and one rep at SIIG. Based on the Thread text, it seems that the problems with optical drives lie primarily with the host controller firmware and secondarily with the drivers. Considering that SATA optical drives haven't really hit the market yet, is it surprising that the present generation of controllers' firmware and software aren't supporting them yet?

Our source of info tells us that it seems to work very well with chipset-based SATA controllers, and not very well with PCI-based controllers.

Which ones? How many different makes and models were tested? The author later states that identical chipsets in the tested onboard controller and PCI-based controller had "slightly different" firmware.

I think I'm a bit more optimistic than the author that firmware and driver support for these drives will come when SATA optical drives have a reasonably sound market presence. I don't think there are hardware-based incompatibilities with the current generation of SATA controllers, which was my initial fear reading the gloom and doom in the article. Then again, I'm pretty optimistic about SATA and Serial Attached SCSI in general (even though the latter seems to be progressing at a snail's pace). I have an onboard SI 3112 SATARaid controller, and I can't wait to put it to use. 2.5" SuperSlim drives + SATA = extremely lightweight, low-profile storage, hot-pluggable mass storage with a much faster bus than FastUSB or Firewire.

NON PHP Link

[archonit.net]

Ease up on their servers ;)

Shows all the pictures as well as text

cdfreaks

Standard drawers.

[deragon]

A bit off topic, but I wish that the industry could settle on standard drawers for Hard Drives. Now that we have hot plugable hard drives with SATA, what we need is a standard drawer so one can take the drive and stick it in someone's else computer.

There are many IDE drawers out there on the market, but they are not mechanically compatible. Its a shame, because HDs could seriously replace floppies if we could just bring them along with us without worying about plugin them in.

Re:Standard drawers.

[2nd Post!]

Hehe, why not use a solution that works, instead of wishing for a solution that doesn't exist?

Firewire hard drives are:

Mechanically compatible
Hot pluggable
Battery powered
Bus powered
Portable
Small

Re:Standard drawers.

[Omega996]

Because people compare published theoretical specifications like they actually mean something.

"Oh, look! SATA supports 150MB per second on each channel - Firewire is only 50MB. Drives on SATA must be faster!!"

Fucking retards. Ah, well...

Re:Standard drawers.

[Anonymous Coward]

Let me know how it goes when one of the drives on your daisy-chained RAID array needs to be swapped out!

Besides, what the original post wanted was a harddrive socket, essentially making a NotCompactFlash standard. The idea being that you just eject the disk and plug it in where you want to use it without having to worry about dragging around a "reader" or cable(s).

aQazaQa

Re:Standard drawers.

[Anonymous Coward]

Firewire is already as good as dead for anything but video applications.

It had it's chance, it didn't get accepted by anyone but the mac crowd, and now it's on it's way out.

Re:Standard drawers.

[deragon]

Is there any standard drawer for Firewire drives? I never heard of that and I bet not. You are offtopic. I am talking about docking the drive within your casing. Not have a bunch of external drives and extra power cords.

Re:Standard drawers.

[2nd Post!]

Bus powered means no extra power cords.

But do what you will. I've been using firewire drives for three years now, and they're awesome. Plug into my desktop, into my laptop, into my friend's computer...

Of course, my first, and what sold me on the idea, drive was an iPod!

Re:Standard drawers.

[orkysoft]

Yeah, and the Mac crowd is using BSD too! They're so dying!

Re:Standard drawers.

[Blew]

Me and some freinds who regularly swaped CD-r/DVD-R's got some removable drive bays from Scan. We ordered five they sent four of one type and one of another, dammed useless. Of course you could go for an ATA - USB2 converter and take the bay with you.

Re:Standard drawers.

[2nd Post!]

Just like all million iPods Apple has sold, Firewire is *clearly* a dead technology.

Three letters: DRM

[Kjella]

They've been working on making 1,8" SATA drives the next big thing in removable storage now for a looong time. The problem is not technical - SATA drives are hot-swap and trivial to create a mechanical enclosure for (something like floppies and zip-disks simply protecting the connectors from dust etc.)

The big reason it doesn't happen is that both the RIAA, MPAA, BSA and whatnot got their panties in a bunch over it. They're stalling for "Trusted Computing" to make these devices "trusted".

The reason? Harddrives are general purpose devicves. They will not be very successful in creating copy restrictions like the non-CDs and CSS DVDs. They won't be able to make special DRM-removable HDDs, so they're waiting for all HDDs to be DRM'd. Just you wait and see...

Kjella

Re:Three letters: DRM

[ph4s3]

I think you're fooling yourself. All you tin-foil hat types like to think that the world's coporations are conspiring against you.

I promise you that if the business case was there for SATA drives, optical or not, removable or not, then the manufacturers would be rushing them to market. Their motivation to get into your wallet is quite large. Why would they want to wait for DRM to be implemented? It's just one more technology that, if integrated into their devices, will require more licensing agreements and rights/royalty fees. Not to mention the fact that if they implement DRM it will have an impact on volumes of data needing to be written to drives, lessening demand for their products.

Firewire is ALWAYS better than USB2.0 for CPU

[Anonymous Coward]

The nature of Firewire is that it's not host-dependent like USB2.0 is. It's really a point-to-point daisy chained interface. You'll be much better off using Firewire in any situation for CPU utilization.

Except for the physical limitations of the medium.

[httpamphibio.us]

S-ATA seems to be the solution for the data transfers involved with 16x DVD recording and the fast 52x CD-RW drives. Did we forget that CDs tend to explode when spun up faster than 56x? That seems like a bigger problem than not having enough bandwidth to transfer data...

S-ATA ?

[Lightman_73]

I wonder how much time will it takes for someone to come up with a S+ATA interface. ;)

Re:What is taking so long? (Protecting content)

[WuphonsReach]

Convert them, and keep the 8mm tapes in a cool, dark, dry place.

One trick for DVDs is to stick PAR2 recovery data on them using QuickPar. Then, once the ECC on the disc can't keep up with the scratches, you have a window of opportunity during which you can repair the damage using the recovery data. The more recovery data there is on the disc, the more damage that can be sustained and still repaired. Only a scratched ToC track is difficult to recover from (have to use a professional service).

Basic steps:
1. Create the VIDEO_TS folder using your DVD authoring program. Leaving 50-250Mb of space on the DVD instead of aiming for the abolute max is probably a reasonable amount.
2. Create recovery data (PAR2) files in the VIDEO_TS folder, using a block size of 1/2/4Mb with enough recovery blocks to fill out the rest of the DVD's capacity.
3. Create an ISO file using ImgTools Classic.
4. Burn the ISO file to DVD.

I haven't had any issues leaving the PAR2 files in the VIDEO_TS folder, but YMMV. (Leaving them there makes it easy to verify the discs a year or two down the road when you suspect damage.)

native SATA?

[Anonymous Coward]

Is this a natively S-ATA drive or is it like the early SATA hard drives where they use a converter chip to glue on a SATA connector to a PATA drive? This hack merely results in increased latency and none of the hypothetical benefits of SATA down the line.

On a side note, I'm impressed this fast burner supports vertical mounting. It's too bad you can't get a Sharper Image stereo looking model.

Standard drawers.-Internal Firewire.

[Anonymous Coward]

"I am talking about docking the drive within your casing. Not have a bunch of external drives and extra power cords."

Ummnm...You do realize that MB's come with internal Firewire, don't you? And since Firewire is a daisychain, one is all that's needed. As far as cages? No as long as computer cases are unique I doubt you'll see HD drawers that work on all.

What is taking so long?-MiniDV.

[Anonymous Coward]

Hmmm...I'm wondering if there's any home backup that used MiniDV tapes?

Re:What is taking so long?-MiniDV.

[Anonymous Coward]

MiniDV tapes are what, 90 minutes? DV runs at 13.5Gb per hour, so that's only around 20Gb per tape.

2.5in USB 40gbyte Hard Drives: 50 retail

[lkcl]

i have had to take back _two_ USB DVD+RW drives, one of them a Hewlett Packard drive and another the Freecom FX-50. i thought i was buying reputable products from reputable companies.

they BOTH failed irrevocably after i created a backup of my hard drive. they BOTH cost around 200 each.

further searches on the internet showed that the HP USB DVD drive had problems with some DVD recording software from france: it was a "known issue" and a fix would be available soon.

in other words, these fucking drives have fucking anti-copying measures in them that, if you don't pay fucking money for fucked fucking proprietary software, the drive fucks itself over.

so, that being the case, why the FUCK is it so cheap to get 40gbyte USB hard drives?

XP Setup & S-ATA

[Akardam]

That's funny. I setup a new machine on an Intel D865PERLX motherboard w/ an 80gb Seagate S-ATA drive, loaded XP Pro SP1a onto it, and it had no problem seeing the drive.

Re:XP Setup & S-ATA

[RzUpAnmsCwrds]

Intel chipset boards usually have a PATA emulation mode so you can install. VIA chipset boards and many other boards do not.

What about SCSI DVD+RW

[emptybody]

I need a SCSI DVD+-RW drive. prefereably Ultra2scsi.

I have a plethora of SunGear yet all I can find out there are IDE or FireWire.

Why are there no SCSI drives?

The solution

[Anonymous Coward]

So set your CD-burning software on High or Realtime priority.

SATA Optical Drives - I've been waiting for this..

[hawkbug]

Why have I been waiting? Because right now I have 2 IDE channels in my computer, and one SATA. I have channel one on the IDE controller used for my hard drive. I have a zip drive (ide) and 2 cdrom drives. The zip and cdrom drives operate at a max ata33. So, if I were to put a cdrom or zip on my primary controller with the hard drive... that slows the transfer rate for my drive from 133 to 33... right? If so, that's unacceptable. So, I currently don't use the zip drive. If they made ATA-133 or SATA-150 cdrom/dvd drives, I'd buy one in a second.

Re:mmmm

[mpinpoint]

i said i like hard drives

SATA is natively supported by some chipsets

[Quizo69]

"Only problem with SATA right now is that XP doesn't support it in the OS, so you have to download drivers to a floppy (a FLOPPY!) and hit F8 during boot to check for 3rd party drivers."

Not true necessarily. I have an Abit IC7 motherboard with a Pentium 4, which uses Intel's 875 chipset. The 875 (and 865) natively support SATA, so you don't need anything special to boot and install your OS. SATA RAID is a different animal (as are all RAID solutions), but straight SATA drives in my machine don't require any drivers at install time.

You may have an older board or a board with an add-in SATA controller, which often DO need install time drivers (F6 BTW not F8).

In short, native SATA support does exist, just not on your particular chipset I'd wager.

Re:Except for the physical limitations of the medi

[code65536]

Yes, they explode. And that's exactly why he said 16x DVD and 52x DVD and NOT 56x DVD. 16x and 52x have long been recognized as the maximum speeds discs can tolerate before exploding. 56x is a total non-issue.

At 16x, DVDs transfer at around 20 MB/s. Which is a fair data speed. Besides, S-ATA has other advantages. With P-ATA, I can't use both of my burners at the same time because they're on the same IDE cable and that really screws up the burn process.