Hrm SATA DVD/CD Drives

Solari · 11 Jan 2007 at 20:21

Hi peeps,

I notice that despite the new rig, reading from CDs is a bit of a bottleneck and slows things down a bit. I get the idea that this is due the IDE bus requiring some CPU time and having some hold over the rest of the system (ie: wait until I've finished before carrying on).

Are there any SATA CD/DVD drives around as I'm thinking that I may as well spend the dosh to get rid of EIDE stuff altogether if possible?

Dark_Angel · 11 Jan 2007 at 20:23

There are!

There is a DVD sata drive on this site, made by samsung, priced at around 23 pounds IIRC.

hashcake · 11 Jan 2007 at 20:25

I've used loads of Samsung SATA DVDRW's in system builds and they are excellent.

Indy500 · 11 Jan 2007 at 20:26

Theres also the Liteon SH-16A7S-05C.

Solari · 11 Jan 2007 at 20:37

Thanks guys - in your experience, does having an SATA drive do away with the EIDE "freezes"?

semi-pro waster · 11 Jan 2007 at 20:41

I'm not even sure there is such a thing as an IDE freeze, it is more likely to be the quality of media or the quality of the reader in the drive causing the system to pause I'd imagine, which might be helped by getting a SATA drive but only really because it is a different drive not because the interface is (that much) superior.

Solari · 11 Jan 2007 at 20:52

Yeah it's typically when reading CD-Rs that the drive struggles and can make the rest of the system a bit sluggish. Was just wondering whether SATA would make any difference at all as I was under the impression that unlike a SCSI controller, EIDE uses CPU cycles...

I could have course be talking absolute horlicks.

Theguy · 11 Jan 2007 at 20:53

technically speaking if the cd drive was being used in PIO mode, that requires quiet abit of the cpu to do the watnots.. thats the only 'IDE freeze' i can think of?
if it was a crap cd drive, or 1 which is falling apart, but other then that?.. ide freeze would be a bugger though, you imagen trying to copy from 1 hd to anotehr?! and it freezing every 10seconds? nasty!