SATA DVD-RW drivers - begin drop prises

[roma_turok]

Affordable Serial ATA DVD burners have taken an awfully long time to arrive in the U.S., but Lite-On has finally (albeit quietly) released a new drive that offers SATA connectivity at a price that rivals that of IDE models. The new drive is dubbed SH-16A7S, and it's now available on Newegg in both bulk and retail versions at respective prices of $32.99 and $35.99. Both variants burn recordable DVDs at 16X, dual-layer recordable DVDs at 8X, DVD+RWs at 8X, and DVD-RWs at 6X. The retail version comes in a box with a copy of Nero Express, while the bulk version is just the bare drive.

Considering Intel is slowly but surely pushing to phase out IDE support from motherboards altogether, a Serial ATA DVD burner is a good investment since DVD burners are items that typically last through multiple upgrades. Besides, SATA allows for much neater cable management than IDE, and the drive should behave just like one of its IDE counterparts in recent motherboards that support IDE emulation mode for SATA drives.

http://techreport.com/onearticle.x/11403

[BJ_M]

well if the drivers are dropping in price - i wonder if the drives will also start to drop ?

[yoda313]

IDE is going to be phased out??????

What about drives that still have life in them??? Are there reliable ide to sata converters to save old drives when you buy a new computer???

[MOVIEGEEK]

IDE is going to be phased out??????

What about drives that still have life in them??? Are there reliable ide to sata converters to save old drives when you buy a new computer???

No but most SATA motherboards have at least one IDE port just as they still come with floppy ports...why do they still have serial ports on mobo's?

[yoda313]

Well thats good to know. Thanks moviegeek

[kush]

Wrong, there are IDE>SATA converters out..Abit (and later on generic versions too) did it for their earlier SATAI capable boards, and later on released a Serillel 2 which purportedly added support for optical drives (not just HDDs)..Never tested that aspect personally though; only used for my IDE hard drives since @ the time SATA was very new and still @ a much higher price than good old IDE/PATA.

example search @ Newegg (2 or 3 by 'Syba' listed) : http://tinyurl.com/y9bnvd
http://www.abit-usa.com/technology/serillel_new.php

[edit] ps Thanks for the info..I wonder if the new LiteOn is a good drive?..I got an NEC 3550A recently, and have problems burning anything other than IMG/ISO on 16x (quality media, ie: Verbatim!) @ anything other than 8x. Can't burn data or straight VIDEO_TS without BAD errors or complete dead burns w/out doing so...Nor can I seem to burn with imgBurn for some reason..I build images w/ it, and have to use it's predecessor Decrypter to do the actual burn (weird but it works).

[MOVIEGEEK]

^ I was answering yoda's question:"IDE is going to be phased out??????"

[budz]

I used a ide to sata converter for my PIONEER 111 drive and it works fine. The converter needs to have that Jmicron chipset. For my BENQ burners the ide to sata converter didn't work well.

I just bought new components to build a Intel duo 2 core cpu computer. The Biostar mobo I have has only 1 ide port so I bought a sata hard drive to use for the OS. Then I can use that 1 ide port for 2 dvd burners.

[TBoneit]

If it burns as good as it's IDE siblings then it will be a solid performer.

kush, it sounds like you have other problems, I seem to recall the 3550 is liked by others here so.... Either you got a bad one or have software problems. Can you do a test burn on another computer with the drive?