18x sata dvd burner 40$

is this faster than the regular burner?

I seriously doubt it as burners dont even saturate PATA. The reason to get this is to be able to use an old hdd on a new mobo with only one PATA connection. Also if these things catch on you can say goodby to PATA connections entirely. Heck on one of intels chipsets they didnt include PATA at all until they relised crap there are hardly any SATA optical drives and they had to revise the chipset and use a competitors chip to handel PATA*. Basically this is more future proof then PATA which may eventually diappear. Until now buying a SATA burner was stupid as there is no performance gain and the price didnt justify it`. This drive is only 10 bucks more expensive then other burners so for the first time its actually worth getting a SATA burner.

*I read this somewhere I can try to dig up some links on this if anyone doesnt believe me.

`heck the first sata drives used pata to sata converters on the back of the unit so basically the unit was a pata drive with a standard off the shelf converter do sata so that they could call it a sata burner.

BossBorot said:

*I read this somewhere I can try to dig up some links on this if anyone doesnt believe me.

Click to expand...

This is mostly correct. Starting with the 945 chipset I believe. I had 3 ide channels, but only one of them was native with windows (so I had to load drivers (F6) during installation to get the windows install to recognize my ide drive(s)). This was a bit of a pain. Unfortunately not many SATA controllers are native, so you have to overcome the same hurtles.

If you get a Samsung 18x drive it is strongly recommended you find the non-official firmware on cdfreaks.com forum for it. The 18x Samsungs have a defect when using DVD-R and maybe other media where they write too large of a blank lead-in whish makes the disks all but unreadable. None of the official Samsung firmwares as of last week fix this.

Anybody know if this drive is any good?

^^ i second that. Anybody know if this drive is worth getting?

ditto

I beleive Samsung has a pretty good record of making quailty drives. I know for the original Xbox the Samsung drive was always the best. But hell i'm happy with my burner so why buy a $40 drive?

I ordered 2,will see.I mostly got these because I have had problems with ide burners using the intel p965 and 975 chipsets.

With Lightscribe too, not bad at all.

Thanks OP

Looks good, I'd go for it if I didn't already have my Plextor SATA. Samsung makes good drives, I've had a few of em. This one does LightScribe and DVD-RAM too. .

As for the native interface, my Plextor is an IDE drive with a built in converter. Everything in windows sees it as a PX-716A and not a PX-716SA.

Don't most MoBo's have issues booting off a SATA CD/DVD (like for OS Installs off CD-R, etc)? Or has that been addressed?

Randyman... said:

Don't most MoBo's have issues booting off a SATA CD/DVD (like for OS Installs off CD-R, etc)? Or has that been addressed?

Click to expand...

i believe someone already said that... some mobos on the other hand don't need a sata driver installed to work... but not all.

I thought it was a BIOS/Chipset issue, not an OS Driver issue? (As in the Installer won't start/won't even boot from the Optical?). Never had an SATA Optical - so I only know what I have read... If it is an OS driver issue, then Slipstreaming the Textmode optical SATA Drivers should certainly work, no?

Did someone already mention this in this thread? Must have missed it

Do you people say "sata" (like "Santa" w/o the "n"), or "Ess A Tee A" like the acronym? I heard Leo Laporte say "sata" (like "Santa") - and is just sounds silly!!! Like calling a P-ATA a "Pata"

i say the acronym. Think of all the ones going around that would be funny (including companies). HP, IBM, PCI-E, AGP, DDR. However I would say that I do not say a dee aye em em slot, I say dim slot.

I either say sata (like santa without the n) or just say serial A T A on the other hand I always say parallel A T A and not pata (as in an indian weapon) or P A T A. The reason I dont call either by just their letter is that after a certain point saying acronym gets silly if you are saying to many letters, for me that happens around 4 except if the acronym is expanding on an already know one like pci-e expanding on pci. Well that was a bad example I call it pci-express when I talk about it in person but whatever.

also usually when I say sata as in santa without the n it is usually when I am talking to people who have no clue what it is and will just look for the word sata on a box. These are the kind of people who would have no clue what serial A T A is if you said it to them anyways.

good to see that we have either a techtv fan or a twit fan around though. I learn random crap from twit like the fact that british people pronounce beta beeta (as in a bee and the sound ta)

Randyman... said:

I thought it was a BIOS/Chipset issue, not an OS Driver issue? (As in the Installer won't start/won't even boot from the Optical?). Never had an SATA Optical - so I only know what I have read... If it is an OS driver issue, then Slipstreaming the Textmode optical SATA Drivers should certainly work, no?

Did someone already mention this in this thread? Must have missed it

Do you people say "sata" (like "Santa" w/o the "n"), or "Ess A Tee A" like the acronym? I heard Leo Laporte say "sata" (like "Santa") - and is just sounds silly!!! Like calling a P-ATA a "Pata"

Click to expand...

It's not a bios issue per-se, most motherboards with sata support will allow you to boot with the sata cdrom drive (just set your boot order accordingly). If it doesn't for whatever reason, then of course you will need to keep a spare ide cdrom laying around for installs and windows repair work. I tried looking online for a definitive answer but it was taking more time than I have right now...

You can most definitely slipstream the needed drivers into your OS install disc. There's several free pieces of software available that make this relatively easy. [Links below are for those unaware of this process]

http://maximumpc.com/2005/01/how_to_slipstre.html
http://www.msfn.org/board/index.php?showtopic=28005

SATA is an acronym and should be pronounced S-A-T-A . We don't call the CIA "See-a".

**oops, looks like my post bumped heads with BossBorat... **

I call sata "sata", and pata "pata"... i could care less and ppl understand what it means... though if it was a no0b, i may say "serial a-t-a", not "s-a-t-a".

As for booting to SATA, as I said before, it depends on the mobo... i don't know how to explain it, but some mobos have the sata chipset actually part of the mobo as the standard model... then some mobos have a higher model with another sata chipset, and those usually need a driver installed to work.

i've owned a sata burner before - you need to install windows with sata drivers before using it on my DFI NF4 mobo. there are other mobos that don't need the F6 sata drivers, and those are the ones you won't have to worry about...

then there are mobos with EXTRA sata ports, where they could have 8 sata ports on the mobo. 4 are one chipset, and the other 4 are a diff sata chipset. in that case, it may depend on which chipset you're hooked up to. one set may not require the sata driver, and the other set may require the F6 sata driver in windows installation. again, it all depends on the mobo's build...

IF YOUR MOBO CAN DETECT A SATA HARD DRIVE IN WINDOWS INSTALLATION WITHOUT THE F6 DRIVER, THEN YOUR MOBO WILL DETECT A SATA OPTICAL DRIVE ON THAT SAME SATA PORT (AND EVEN ITS NEIGHBORING PORT, AS LONG AS IT'S THE SAME SATA CHIPSET).

dern I need one too....