Seriel ATA CD-Rom Drives

[IanMatthew]

Looking at Serial ATA HDD's recently. Nice idea. Got to wishing my new motherboard was so equipped, but then again Serial ATA won't offer much speed advantage at the moment.

However have not seen ANY serial ATA CD-Rom / DVD-Rom drives or CD/DVD-Rewriters. Has anyone seen them or are they not viable. They must be as serial ATA is all about extra speed an simplicity, right...

So right now any one investing in a serial ATA MB and HDD, along with suitable cabling / adapters will still have to use standard ATA 33/66/100/133 optical drives along with the "old" style ports and cables.

[$1500-P4 gamer]

No. the issue is two fold kinda. First remember the fastest interface cdrom is Pioneer slot drive ata 66. No ata 100 cdrom even yet. No reason-the drive itself is the bottleneck.
Second thing is. No need for SATA cdroms. They have SATA to parallel adaptors for just that. While not being any faster than normal IDE when used like this (and can even increase latency of drive) it will allow ide and sata on the same controler.

Now most SATA equiped mobos like my asus A7N8X deluxe (nforce2)also have IDE ports, so your still OK even in a pinch just use rounded cables. In my case RAID SATA! Yehaw! The biggest thing about sata is no air flow restriciton and easy to route. SATA gains arent much till rpms go up more to drop seek times and balance it out some. The raid sata for HDD's though is really impresive. Blows ata raid outta the water but no where near scsi yet. 10k SATA is on the way I bet. Mmm drool- 80gig 8mb cache raid 0 10k array. Id like that! The cdroms, I could care less. I'll either use adaptor or run them off the old IDE ports already on mobo too.:D