S-ATA is so cool.... but where's the s-ata cd/dvd drives?

Just bought a new barracuda5 120Gb s-ata drive

They are so cool! Bog standard ata cables seem so old fashioned now. I just wish there were s-ata cd writers / dvd drives. Oh well I suppose I'll have to wait a bit for that.

As for the performace, well there's not exactly miles of distance between the s-ata drives and the parra drives I have. Must be being bottlenecked by the PCI bus :-(

Funny thing was I bought it cos I needed more space, but have run out of parra ata channels. It wasn't even on the price list in the shop. I got it for the same as the cheapest price I've found on the net. It's good to buy regularly from a local vendor, I get a wicked discount deal without even asking now!!!! + There's less hassle if things go wrong!

thingi

Only drawback with S-ATA is that you can only have one drive on each channel, hope future boards'll come with 4+ channels!

Raniz said:

Only drawback with S-ATA is that you can only have one drive on each channel, hope future boards'll come with 4+ channels!

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Actually, that's supposedly a good point about SATA. You don't have to worry about master/slave (or primary/secondary if you prefer) relations. Also, since the port on the motherboard is so much smaller than traditional ATA, a manufacturer can theoretically fit more of them onto the motherboard.

I ask the same question a few days ago, can't seem to find the thread, but the general consensus was that we wont see them until the become and industry standard, as not all apati devices are compatable with all motherboards. So it may be awhile still.

Hmmmm ::takes notes:: being that my main rig said "screw it" and died.. This sata drive stuff starting to sound better and better

You might see an optical S-ATA drive in 2005-maybe. That's when the second-generation Blue Laser drives are projected to hit the streets. They will have a transfer rate of 18GB/sec. They could still run two of these drive on one ATA100 channel and have a ton of headroom left over, but I suspect the drive makers will move then if for no other reason than to pump up hype for what will be the first generation of mass-market Blue Lasers.

You'll see a S-ATA version of the 650MB CD-RW about the time we have S-ATA floppy drives.




BHD

S-ATA floppy drives.

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Wow they just won't die will they? I think we'll be rid of floppies soon with new motherboards being to able to boot from CD and USB keys.
Another thing with S-ATA is just the bus has changed but harddrives them selves are still a 30 year old design, using magnetic pulses to write to metal platters. We need something like the new RAMdrives. But then we're limited by the PCI bus.

Tebore said:

But then we're limited by the PCI bus.

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not for long...PCI-X or native chipset interfaces will take care of that shortly

PCI-Express, right?