Some of the People, Some of the Time . . .

So far, SATA has moved well into the mainstream for hard drives. Parallel drives are still around, but they’re clearly on their way out.

This hasn’t happened with optical drivers, more specifically, DVD burners. There’s been hardly anything going on there.

This won’t last much longer. Digitimes reports from its usual Taiwanese mobo maker sources that more SATA drives will become available this quarter, and should have at least a chance to become mainstream in 2H 2007.

Why should you care? Well, maybe you should, maybe you shouldn’t.

If you haven’t look at a new mobo lately, they generally have lots of SATA connection, but have cut back to one IDE channel.

That means two devices: master and slave. If you have three beloved IDE devices, unless you want to chew up an increasingly rare PCI slot with an IDE adapter, or spend $10-20 on adapters, something’s got to go.

Additionally, when it comes to devices like DVD burners, you really don’t want the source hard drive and the target burner on the same IDE channel that can do just one thing at a time.

A lot of people will say, “What’s the big deal?” and for many, there is no big deal, if you already use SATA drives only, there’s no deal at all.

Nor can it be said that SATA burners will offer any significant performance advantage over ATAPI drives. We’ll be well into the high-definition era before that comes into play.

So if you can juggle your current devices with six SATA and one IDE channel, never mind . . . .

But if you can’t, start looking.

Ed