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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. "
I guess I can now confirm that I have no interest in buying anything from SiiG.
Kinetic stupidity has a new brand leader: Allen Zadr.
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)
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.
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.
Up, Up, Down, Down, Left, Right, Left, Right, B, A, START
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.
GPL Deconstructed
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.
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.
I read the internet for the articles.
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.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
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.