SATA optical drives?

That's for sure! The sata dvd burner here seems no faster then the ide model on the last build. But the faster is certainly faster with a dual core cpu over a single core model. That carries the work load much easier rather then tying down cpu time.

One thing looked at while selecting a board with more then two pci slots was seeing 6 sata ports on a single ide channel board over others with two pci and only 4 ports. This allows for expansion there if I replace the present ide cd writer with a sata model.

When going for one of the new WD GP(Green Power) 1tb drives for storage I can move Vista to the second 500gb storage drive and leave the ide channel vacant for slaving drive for things like data retrieval from old cases. The GP for WD refers to the new energy saving feature in those large capacity drives as everything swings in the sata direction as the standard.

Sata 1 drives however did see jumpers on some models. Those also saw Legacy power connections along with the standard sata plugin. If you run across one of those the best setting is the default or removing the jumper entirely since that's drive mode not position on a cable as seen with ide type drives. The following image shows jumper information on one WD Sata1 model outlined at http://wdc.custhelp.com/cgi-bin/wdc....i=&p_topview=1

Even though the read/write speeds aren't much better with SATA drives, the big advantage is that they don't share the same cable/port, so you can be writing to many drives at the same time and it won't slow down or cause errors like multiple IDE drives do.

You won't load the data stream on the same cable since only one for each drive is the thought there. But you will see the same demand for power and data stream going through the memory on the way to the cpu.

The next evolution in sata would then see a benefit of hardware improvements to utilitize the sata bus more fully. Blu Ray is one gain over the typical dvd presently whether sata or ide. Working on cases without seeing any bulky iide cables? Even better!

I was referring to IDE, where when you have two drives on the same cable theres a significant slow down when reading / writing to both drives at the same time.

Yes and in addition to that the cpu being made a work horse is where you will also see things get bogged down. The expression multitasking applies there. The type of media will also have to change in that sense as well.

Consider the leap from tape drives over cds when first introduced to make a comparison there. T_O_O summed it up quite well with the present ATA33 media we are all using on both ide and sata optical drives. A software installer will take the same amount of time for the same program on the old Socket A build as the present AM2 case due to the read/write speed limitations on the current media.