About damn time!

Still have an IDE drive, but happy to see that it'll be the last one. Legacy-ware be gone!

Probably has something to do with Windows Optical support sucking. Ever put in a disk and open Windows explorer? Why does it need to lock up completely every time?
(XP, not sure if they addressed this for Vista)

Is it technically possible for someone else to write an Windows Explorer replacement that uses asynchronous mode, to avoid the lock-up issues that Indeego referred to?

:oO Anyone have any opinions on the price increase for SATA devices? It's not only optical SATA drives but even now the SATA version often costs more than the PATA version of the same HD. I could understand a little in the early days but surely now the only excuse is that they think we'll pay more (which it obviously seems we will).

at least it would free up space on mobo's. Would be nice to get rid of FDD, IDE, serial, parallel, PS2 ports permanently. 16bit ISA legacy hardware should be tossed.

I had a PX-716SA for almost two years. SATA for optical drives is all about cabling not performance.

The vast majority of the current problems and why it took so long for optical manufacturers to stop into the SATA bandwagon come from SATA controller support.

SATA-I and SATA300 standard did not require ATAPI support, while newer SATA-II standard requires it.

There are a large number of SATA-I and SATA300 that lack ATAPI support (Sli3112, Sil3114, ICH5, Micron etc). That is why any of SATA optical drive will not work correctly under those controllers. You ether have stability problems, the drive burns coasters, or the OS fails to detect the drive.

AHCI mode and drivers also create another set of problems, since they are optimized for HDD usage. I discover this by upgrading my SATA drivers for my ICH7 to AHCI drivers. They only increase HDD by like a few percentage point in synthetic benches, while rendering my PX-716SA into a coaster maker.

The drive was burning discs correctly prior to my experiment with AHCI mode/drivers. I infer that the drivers were the curpit. I was forced to do a reinstall of XP64 in order to revert back to the standard SATA drivers and my burner was working perfectly again!

I've got the samsung SH-S183 and it's worked flawlessly since day 1. It sure makes for a clean case. It was the final ide cable to go, as I've run sata hdds since 2004.

I have found that PSU makers are far behind the curve on the Shift to SATA. My year-old PSU only has two SATA connectors! I didn't think anything of it when I bought it to power my two SATA HDDs, but now that I have a SATA DVD and another SATA HDD I'm needing all these crappy adapters.

Thank god. I have been waiting for SATA DVD drives for so damn long.

I picked up the Pioneer 212D IIRC, it works fine, no problems at all.
IIRC there was a series of the Pioneers with a lower build quality but this doesn't seem too bad, it's no 108 but it seems better than the 110 I had temporarily (utter rubbish, flimsy, 3 DOA's etc)

Also for reasons UNKNOWN to me, even with a 2ghz X2 or 2ghz C2D and 2gb ram I could not burn to both my PATA burners at the same time, even at 4X

Mind you..... before you go telling me about channel problems and master slave and 33mb limits.

This is .

2 hard disks as source drives, both SATA obviously independant channels.
2 DVDroms either on the same cable / channel or seperate channels! (even on the same channel, 4x is less than 5mb a second)

It doesn't make sense, in one instance I had 4 seperate channels and I'd still see weird problems of fluctuations on the buffer and several reduced burning performance, all fixed with my SATA burner now.