hey there, so I'm building myself a new pc after christmas, and was wondering if it's really worth replacing the dvd drives i have (which are IDE) with SATA drives. the motherboard i'm looking at has an IDE connector, so I can use them. Has anyone upgraded? noticed any really big differences? cheers!
SATA is the newer technology and is faster, so I would get the sata drive. The old IDE ribbon styled cables are bigger and kill the airflow inside your case. The SATA cables are smaller and thinner, so airflow is improved.
Just bear in mind that, for reasons unknown, S-ATA optical drives produce more noise than IDE drives.
yes thats tru...but do you prefer a slower but quieter drive or faster but little noise drive...i'll take the second option...thnx
But for the fact that S-ATA drives aren't actually any faster than IDE drives, I'd agree with that point. Just because the interface is faster doesn't make any difference to the speed of the drive. A 20x DVD drive will read/write data at no more than 27MB/s. Consider that IDE can take up to 100MB/s, why would you bother with S-ATA for speed? The advantage I can think of is to not have that huge great cable in the way of everything, but other than that, I see no reason to worry about S-ATA Optical drives.
the only reason to go for Sata over IDE is to improve airflow, it looks less ugly, and if you have no more IDE slots. the newer mobos in a few years wont even do IDE, so why not upgrade. IDE driver run as fast as SATA, because no drives run anywhere near the max speed that the cables can provide.
i gotta agree with that one...some people, including me, think that SATA is faster...because the spec for it say so and the cable is much smaller than IDE cable...so i think its faster...but seriously you can't really see the difference tho...
but sata is getting more popular now...and ide is fading away slowly...i wonder what thechnology would they have in another 10 years...
For optical disc drives? Not sure, but Optical discs are now the slowest commonly used data store in PCs, so some form of technological update must soon be due. Hard drives can manage up to around 75MB/s in mainstream, RAM and CPU cache are several GB/s, yet even the fastest of DVD drives can't reach 30MB/s.
thanks guys. i'm not to worried about how ugly they are - my case doesn't have any windows, but i hear what you're saying about the IDE ribbons impeding airflow. i think probably i'll get it up and running with the drives i have, and then switch them out sometime in the near future.
Not exactly. In a tight space, the huge connectors still take up a reasonable amount of room. I still much prefer S-ATA connectors.
I agree sata makes for a much cleaner case even if rounded ide cables are used ive had both. Also another advantage to sata is you dont have to worry about sliping out of DMA into PIO mode.
Well, that only happens when your PC gets infected with Starforce, and I believe that will still destroy S-ATA drives. It may not have the PIO speed impact though.
I never had a drive destroyed?But have have had them slip in to PIO mode after to many errors just reset to DMA and there fine.With SATA that is a thing of the past.
If your PC is actually infected with starforce's viral software, changing back to DMA isn't possible. This is usually when the drive gets destroyed.
OK,i think were not really talking about the same thing.The most common reason for a DVD port to fall back to PIO mode is a drive trying over and over to read a scratched or dirty DVD for this you uninstall and reinstall the device in Device Manager.
Well, same thing really. Starforce forces the drive to run so poorly it picks up millions of errors and is put in PIO mode.
You said Starforce will destroy the drive and changing back to DMA isn't possible.That is not the case with it falling in to PIO mode from read errors are i would have a pile of destroyed burners by now.