SATA optical drives?

The book I'm reading (from 2006) warns against SATA optical drives because of compatibility issues, but I'm having trouble finding PATA drives on newegg. Or is PATA the same as E-IDE / ATAPI? Is IDE also the same?

Thanks.

Also, is it still the case that PATA is preferable for an optical drive?

Get SATA, i love them. Nothing wrong with them, i havn't ever heard of compatibility issues. Im runnning two sata drives. Beats the heck out of having bulky IDE cables...



IDE is PATA, i do beleive.

The first sata dvd burner in the new build here has been quite reliable so far. Many vendors will now stocking more sata models since boards are going sata for the most part with most now seeing only one ide channel. The term PATA represents Parallel ATA while sata represent Serial ATA using a thinner single data cable for each drive.



The image above is a typical sata data cabled included in the retail carton a board comes in. Those are 7pin connectors compared to the 80wire/80conductor seen with a standard ATA100/133 drive.

PATA = IDE

I have two SATA DVD burners and I've never had a problem. They work fine for loading OS's as well.

The IDE cable has 80 wires with 40 pins. It has 40 extra ground wires to add to stability

Thanks again everyone. I guess at this point I can only hope that the parts I'm choosing will just come together and work for me.

But don't worry, you will all be blessed with my final parts list in another few days.

40pin VS 80pin "Ultra" IDE Cables? Wha does that have to do with sata optical drives? If I need a dictionary,


Ultra DMA (80-Conductor) IDE/ATA Cables
There are a lot of issues and problems associated with the original 40-conductor IDE cable, due to its very old and not very robust design. Unterminated [COLOR=blue! important][COLOR=blue! important]flat [COLOR=blue! important]ribbon [/color][COLOR=blue! important]cables[/color][/color][/color] have never been all that great in terms of signal quality and dealing with reflections from the end of the cable. The warts of the old design were tolerable while signaling speeds on the [COLOR=blue! important][COLOR=blue! important]IDE[/color][/color]/ATA interface were relatively low, but as the speed of the interface continued to increase, the limitations of the cable were finally too great to be ignored.
In the ATA/ATAPI-4 standard that introduced the Ultra DMA transfer mode set, a new cable was introduced to replace the old standby: the 80-conductor IDE/[COLOR=blue! important][COLOR=blue! important]ATA [COLOR=blue! important]cable[/color][/color][/color]. The name is important: the new cable has 80 conductors (wires)--it does not have 80 pins on each connector, though, just 40. This means that the new cable is pin-compatible with the old drive. No change has been made to the IDE/ATA connectors, aside from the color-coding issue (see below). http://www.pcguide.com/ref/hdd/if/id...Cable80-c.html

80 Conductor means 80 wires not 80 pins, it still has 40 pins. Read the last 3 lines in your copy and paste

Where did I say "80pin"? The most commonly used term is 80conductor/40pin that replaced the old 40conductor/40pin cables. Again you never bother to fully read anything.

Right there



But to add to the question, either will be basically the same. For the most part companies are moving over to SATA. I believe it was Seagate who no longer produces IDE hard drives anymore. Optical drives will soon follow. However, besides smaller cable sizes and being slightly easier to configure(IE no jumpers) there's no advantages. Most optical drives peak around ATA33 speeds.