our new sata dvd opticals
 

Most of us probably have these new dvd/cd players/burners in our computers.

Some of the newer ones have the sata capable wiring and some(usually older but some new still available) have the ide cabling.

other than the simplification cabling less of it thickness...and no need for jumpers(M,S, CS) hence no mb controller necessary for that

Q: Is there a speed difference or performance difference
between SATA or IDE opticals?
Yes No depends?

You can probably find a bandwidth/transfer speed comparison of the two by a simple Google search. But, these SATA drives have actually been around for quite some time. I would highly suggest switching to one for better airflow, performance, and looks i.e. less clutter.

Just looked it up...IDE has transfer speeds of up to 1Gbps (gigaBIT), while SATA can have up to 5 Gbps (again, gigaBIT, not BYTE). An IDE drive with today's speeds is not possible. SATA is the way to go.

While I agree with the less clutter and better airflow, I was wondering about the part about today's speeds. From what I can tell a 20x DVD drive has a data rate of 211 Mbps (please someone correct me if I'm wrong found info on wikipedia) which is far below the 1Gbps of the IDE transfer speed.

So really for today's drives an IDE should give the same speed as a equivalent speed SATA drive. Now if there were 100x drives then I might say SATA would be better because of the speed.

Yeah I see your point but it was really the hard drives that pushed optical drives to go sata. Why use old tech when new is better? Makes sense to me. There really is no point buying old hardware that has been around for ages. Imho, if you are buying an old DVD drive, it's time to upgrade. However I wouldn't care if you used an old one from a transfer to a new computer.

I was simply stating the theoretical transfer speeds of the cables. I should have mentioned the speeds of the drives. They only switched because everything else did.

Also I foresee motherboards ditching IDE ports all together soon enough as they simple aren't needed anymore.

IIRC alot of sata drives are equiped with atapi support to improve compatibility with chipsets which emulates the drive as an IDE device and doesn't offer any benefits of the faster Sata interface.

I know my drive is/was configured as an IDE device even though it uses a SATA interface.

Regards,

EE

I like all the comments. I had been wondering this for some time.
even though a new computer I'd probably of course get sata dvd optical.....for existing maybe ide still okay if it works.

I doubt that for some time. Most boards still come with Serial ports and they are as old as the hills.

I'd say IDE will be on boards for a long time still.. hell.. my board has floppy drive support :shok:

I actually confess to still ue a floppy

I have one on board

My parallel and serial are turned off thou.

At one time parallel printers were the norm and we still see the ports provided on new 'boards