DVD-RM/RW SATA compatibility

[kleinwl]

When are we going to get properly support SATA optical drives? I absolutely hate the silly IDE cables (even the round ones) in my system. I'm going through a building a new machine (all SATA), but research has indicated that the nforce4 chipset doesn't play nice with sata.

Plexor has already released SATA drives (although they are not native sata) and I'm sure the rest would follow if only the chipset would work. So does anyone know when (or how) this issue is going to be fixed and we will start to see some SATA opticals?

 

[Peter]

This isn't actually a chipset issue. Rather more, BIOS firmware and OS drivers would have to support ATAPI command set even if an IDE or SATA channel is in "native PCI" mode rather than "legacy IDE compatible".

 

[kleinwl]

so, if it is not an chipset issue, what is preventing the upgrading of the BIOS firmware and OS drivers to allow the widespread adoption of SATA optical drives?

It just seems very frustrating that such a good technology, such as SATA, is being held back. I would like to see the day that IDE is entirely eliminated from the motherboard and PSUs only have SATA power connections (aside from the 24pin motherboard cable). I think that my system would be much cleaner inside, than at present.

 

[Peter]

Chicken and egg. Practically no SATA optical drives out in the market, no mainboards w/o PATA either, thus, no pressure to get that feature set into the SATA drivers.

Besides, I would prefer the chipset makers to first get the ATA command set operation right in those SATA drivers ... particularly NVidia. How come the chipset maker's OWN drivers are performing worse, MUCH worse than Microsoft's generic ones?

There is hope from the hardware front though - the next generation of chipsets will have standardized "AHCI" programming model SATA interfaces. That will allow the software to be generic, all the way from BIOS to OS drivers. That's another factor to "where's the beef" ... I guess none of the chipset makers bother adding ATAPI to their proprietary drivers that are already heading into obsoletion.