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DVD Burner - IDE vs SATA
Am I right in believing that a DVD burner using SATA is going to be
noticeably faster in burning disks (given the same speed, e.g. 12X) than an IDE-based burner? It's time I replaced my old burner because it's getting harder and harder to coax the drawer open. It can take up to five minutes of clicking on "Eject" in the Windows context menu before the darned thing finally opens. I have the ASUS-M3A motherboard which has SATA so I assume that I can get a SATA-based burner. (Correct me if I'm wrong!) How many SATA devices will that board support? I already have two SATA hard drives and intend to install a third SATA hard drive very soon so is a SATA burner even possible or will I have exhausted my SATA capacity at that point? Sorry, that may be a dumb question. I'm not a hardware guy and know almost nothing about SATA and IDE. -- Rhino |
#2
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DVD Burner - IDE vs SATA
"Rhino" wrote in message ... Am I right in believing that a DVD burner using SATA is going to be noticeably faster in burning disks (given the same speed, e.g. 12X) than an IDE-based burner? It's time I replaced my old burner because it's getting harder and harder to coax the drawer open. It can take up to five minutes of clicking on "Eject" in the Windows context menu before the darned thing finally opens. I have the ASUS-M3A motherboard which has SATA so I assume that I can get a SATA-based burner. (Correct me if I'm wrong!) How many SATA devices will that board support? I already have two SATA hard drives and intend to install a third SATA hard drive very soon so is a SATA burner even possible or will I have exhausted my SATA capacity at that point? Sorry, that may be a dumb question. I'm not a hardware guy and know almost nothing about SATA and IDE. Please disregard this question. A quick Google brought up this page - http://www.computer-hardware-explain...ta-vs-ide.html - which says SATA is hands-down faster than IDE. I also see from a previous post I had made that someone already told me that I could connect 4 SATA devices to my ASUS M3A motherboard. That means my two existing SATA hard drives, a SATA DVD burner and a third SATA hard drive will all work together on my computer. Forgive my bad memory ;-) -- Rhino |
#3
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DVD Burner - IDE vs SATA
Rhino wrote:
"Rhino" wrote in message ... Am I right in believing that a DVD burner using SATA is going to be noticeably faster in burning disks (given the same speed, e.g. 12X) than an IDE-based burner? It's time I replaced my old burner because it's getting harder and harder to coax the drawer open. It can take up to five minutes of clicking on "Eject" in the Windows context menu before the darned thing finally opens. I have the ASUS-M3A motherboard which has SATA so I assume that I can get a SATA-based burner. (Correct me if I'm wrong!) How many SATA devices will that board support? I already have two SATA hard drives and intend to install a third SATA hard drive very soon so is a SATA burner even possible or will I have exhausted my SATA capacity at that point? Sorry, that may be a dumb question. I'm not a hardware guy and know almost nothing about SATA and IDE. Please disregard this question. A quick Google brought up this page - http://www.computer-hardware-explain...ta-vs-ide.html - which says SATA is hands-down faster than IDE. I also see from a previous post I had made that someone already told me that I could connect 4 SATA devices to my ASUS M3A motherboard. That means my two existing SATA hard drives, a SATA DVD burner and a third SATA hard drive will all work together on my computer. Forgive my bad memory ;-) -- Rhino I'm glad you posted here, in a motherboard group, because we can give you the right answer. First, you have to consider the media limits of the device you're using. For example, many people will glom onto "SATA III" for a hard drive and say to themselves "dis baby gonna fly". Well, the thing is, the platters and head assembly on a rotating media hard drive, have a limited transfer speed. On a good day, somewhere in the 125MB/sec to 135MB/sec transfer range. SATA III is largely a waste for such a chore. SATA II is perfectly acceptable for hard drives. Only an SSD can justify SATA III, because it's possible to build flash based drives with less of a media-based limitation. (Just keep putting more flash chips in parallel, on more channels.) So, let's consider your optical drive question. I'm going to reverse the order a bit here, to save time. First, I check my DVD burner on my IDE bus. And this is what Nero InfoTool reports, for the current transfer mode. IDE has various UDMA modes, and the modes are set up to be backward compatible. The fastest mode the bus applies, is not always available on the device itself. That's why I'm checking it, rather than just reporting the max the bus supports. For example, if you visit some website, it promises UDMA6 and 133MB/sec speeds. On my optical drive, it reports UDMA4 and 66MB/sec as the bus speed right now. The bus can go faster, but the optical drive has chosen those numbers as (perfectly acceptable) limits. You'll see why that's good enough in a moment. http://img717.imageshack.us/img717/6...p20idemode.gif I translate the UDMA4 number, with a table from here. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UDMA "Ultra DMA 4 Ultra ATA/66 66.7 MB/sec Next stop, is an article on DVDs. There is a "DVD drive speed" table, half way down the page. I take the fastest entry from that table. The last time I checked, I couldn't find any 24X media, so I don't know if anyone has actually managed to run this speed of media in the real world. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dvd Drive speed 24× 33.24 MB/sec That means my IDE connected DVD drive is perfectly acceptable for the job (66.7 33.24, no starvation will occur). I also own a SATA DVD burner as well, and I really don't care on a given day, which one is connected. One drive makes a bit more motor noise than the other, but that's the only difference between my 66MB/sec IDE DVD drive and whatever speed the SATA DVD wants to claim. By the way, if you're checking your SATA drive for a "UDMA speed", the speed reported is bogus. On an Intel system it'll report UDMA5, primarily because on Intel IDE ports, they never supported more than UDMA5. On other chipsets, you'll see a bogus UDMA6 report. The SATA speed is not determined by "UDMA" at all (the hardware path is different, it's a high speed serial bus). And such a report is primarily present for compatibility reasons, to keep any inquisitive software happy. That bogus value reported, has nothing to do with the actual hardware transfers. The only situation you'd have to worry about, would be placing your DVD burner inside a USB2 enclosure. Some enclosure chips plus motherboard combinations, cannot hit the 33.24MB/sec speed. For example, one ATI Southbridge is down around 20MB/sec USB2 max, due to a bad Southbridge design. If you own such a motherboard, and you had the mythical 24X DVD media, then you'd be better off connecting the burner to your motherboard IDE or SATA ports, rather than a USB2 socket. Sorry I didn't read your computer-hardware-explained site :-) HTH, Paul |
#4
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DVD Burner - IDE vs SATA
"Paul" wrote in message ... Rhino wrote: "Rhino" wrote in message ... Am I right in believing that a DVD burner using SATA is going to be noticeably faster in burning disks (given the same speed, e.g. 12X) than an IDE-based burner? It's time I replaced my old burner because it's getting harder and harder to coax the drawer open. It can take up to five minutes of clicking on "Eject" in the Windows context menu before the darned thing finally opens. I have the ASUS-M3A motherboard which has SATA so I assume that I can get a SATA-based burner. (Correct me if I'm wrong!) How many SATA devices will that board support? I already have two SATA hard drives and intend to install a third SATA hard drive very soon so is a SATA burner even possible or will I have exhausted my SATA capacity at that point? Sorry, that may be a dumb question. I'm not a hardware guy and know almost nothing about SATA and IDE. Please disregard this question. A quick Google brought up this page - http://www.computer-hardware-explain...ta-vs-ide.html - which says SATA is hands-down faster than IDE. I also see from a previous post I had made that someone already told me that I could connect 4 SATA devices to my ASUS M3A motherboard. That means my two existing SATA hard drives, a SATA DVD burner and a third SATA hard drive will all work together on my computer. Forgive my bad memory ;-) -- Rhino I'm glad you posted here, in a motherboard group, because we can give you the right answer. First, you have to consider the media limits of the device you're using. For example, many people will glom onto "SATA III" for a hard drive and say to themselves "dis baby gonna fly". Well, the thing is, the platters and head assembly on a rotating media hard drive, have a limited transfer speed. On a good day, somewhere in the 125MB/sec to 135MB/sec transfer range. SATA III is largely a waste for such a chore. SATA II is perfectly acceptable for hard drives. Only an SSD can justify SATA III, because it's possible to build flash based drives with less of a media-based limitation. (Just keep putting more flash chips in parallel, on more channels.) So, let's consider your optical drive question. I'm going to reverse the order a bit here, to save time. First, I check my DVD burner on my IDE bus. And this is what Nero InfoTool reports, for the current transfer mode. IDE has various UDMA modes, and the modes are set up to be backward compatible. The fastest mode the bus applies, is not always available on the device itself. That's why I'm checking it, rather than just reporting the max the bus supports. For example, if you visit some website, it promises UDMA6 and 133MB/sec speeds. On my optical drive, it reports UDMA4 and 66MB/sec as the bus speed right now. The bus can go faster, but the optical drive has chosen those numbers as (perfectly acceptable) limits. You'll see why that's good enough in a moment. http://img717.imageshack.us/img717/6...p20idemode.gif I translate the UDMA4 number, with a table from here. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UDMA "Ultra DMA 4 Ultra ATA/66 66.7 MB/sec Next stop, is an article on DVDs. There is a "DVD drive speed" table, half way down the page. I take the fastest entry from that table. The last time I checked, I couldn't find any 24X media, so I don't know if anyone has actually managed to run this speed of media in the real world. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dvd Drive speed 24× 33.24 MB/sec That means my IDE connected DVD drive is perfectly acceptable for the job (66.7 33.24, no starvation will occur). I also own a SATA DVD burner as well, and I really don't care on a given day, which one is connected. One drive makes a bit more motor noise than the other, but that's the only difference between my 66MB/sec IDE DVD drive and whatever speed the SATA DVD wants to claim. By the way, if you're checking your SATA drive for a "UDMA speed", the speed reported is bogus. On an Intel system it'll report UDMA5, primarily because on Intel IDE ports, they never supported more than UDMA5. On other chipsets, you'll see a bogus UDMA6 report. The SATA speed is not determined by "UDMA" at all (the hardware path is different, it's a high speed serial bus). And such a report is primarily present for compatibility reasons, to keep any inquisitive software happy. That bogus value reported, has nothing to do with the actual hardware transfers. The only situation you'd have to worry about, would be placing your DVD burner inside a USB2 enclosure. Some enclosure chips plus motherboard combinations, cannot hit the 33.24MB/sec speed. For example, one ATI Southbridge is down around 20MB/sec USB2 max, due to a bad Southbridge design. If you own such a motherboard, and you had the mythical 24X DVD media, then you'd be better off connecting the burner to your motherboard IDE or SATA ports, rather than a USB2 socket. Sorry I didn't read your computer-hardware-explained site :-) Wow, you're a wealth of information as usual, Paul! I'm going to need a bit of time to digest all of this.... I'll come back if I have any followup questions. Thanks again! -- Rhino |
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