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OPTICAL Drives and Z87 motherboards

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imported_Larry

Junior Member
OK so I'm looking to buy myself a nice new Z87 based motherboard and one of the critical factors, surprisingly, is Optical drive storage capability. I do a lot of photography (amateur) and store my shots to optical disks for archive purposes. I also want a raid 5 array using conventional disks to provide a large data archive area while editing photos or amateur movies (mostly of college stage productions I get involved in) plus the capacity for one or two SSD's for fast boot and load of programs (not data storage). A good 8 or 10 SATA port board is needed. Now here's the problem.
In looking at SATA ports on motherboards I would like to configure the Optical drives to the non-Z87 ports (The Z-87 based ports would be configured for AHCI/RAID mode to support the SSD and Hard drive RAID configs) which means the non Z-87 ports would need to support IDE/ATAPI mode and yet, so far, all of the motherboards I have looked at carry a notice (usually buried in the footnotes) that the controller only supports conventional HDD's and SSD's (ACHI mode only).
Does anyone know of a new Z87 type motherboard where the extended SATA ports reliably support Optical Disk Drives (Blu-Ray, DVD, CD)?
 
Buy a $20 PCI Express card for connecting the optical drive.
Then you can shop for whatever Z87 MB that floats your boat.
 
Blain;
A possibility but....
I'm not really fond of buying little side adapters or add-in cards that perform functions that OUGHT to be standard. Optical drives with SATA interfaces are commonplace now. Why would manufactures not just add in the support mode in the first place? These motherboards aren't cheap and most people have an optical drive (or two) for playing the occasional movie on the PC or downloading a game from CD. Why should it require buying yet another card to get the functionality? If I was asking do SAS or normal SCSI sure, but support for optical drives? It simply irritates the *&^! out of me.

Larry
 
I don't think the optical drive is going to have a problem with AHCI unless it's really old (and if it's THAT old, I think it would be PATA, not SATA?)

Also, unless you are burning discs to put in a stand-alone DVD or Bluray player, optical media has been OBSOLETE for at least a decade.

An extra HDD (including an external one) is far cheaper, far faster, far more compact, and far more reliable than equivalent storage space in optical media.
 
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I'm successfully running optical drives on an Asus Sabertooth Z87 which has the ASMedia 3rd party extra SATA ports, and running the optical drives from the ASMedia ports.

Don't install the ASMedia SATA drivers, and just use the default Windows SATA driver for those ports. You can use the Intel RST drivers for the native Intel SATA ports.
 
I have set the SATA ports, which are all controlled by the Intel H77 chipset, in my Asrock H77M to AHCI mode, and the cheap DVD burner in the system works without issue.
 
glugglug;

That's what I do with them mostly. Edit videos of community, college, and amateur theater productions and distribute the edited videos to my performers for their amusement and resumes. Also videos of vacations, picture collections, amateur photography stuff. Have a nice filing box for the efforts. Hard drives are to vulnerable for long term archival storage.
 
Wendy;

Thank you. That's the kind of info I was looking for. ASUS was a first choice and they were one of the first I noticed the footnote saying "Suitable for hard drives and SSD drives only". Perhaps the ASMedia drivers are the limitation. Just not sure. I'm still trying to get a solid answer on the Marvell drivers that Gigabyte uses.

LArry
 
imported_Larry said:
I'm still trying to get a solid answer on the Marvell drivers that Gigabyte uses.
Click to expand...

I have run an ODD from the Marvell 9128, using the standard MS ACHI driver, for over a year now on my P8Z77-V Deluxe. Never had any problem what-so-ever...

Also if the drive has a SATA interface it WILL work in ACHI mode on every SATA controller out there. Only some very old first generation SATA1 controllers don't support ODDs. Even then it can usually be fixed by an OROM update...
 
imported_Larry said:
glugglug;

That's what I do with them mostly. Edit videos of community, college, and amateur theater productions and distribute the edited videos to my performers for their amusement and resumes. Also videos of vacations, picture collections, amateur photography stuff. Have a nice filing box for the efforts. Hard drives are to vulnerable for long term archival storage.
Click to expand...

DVDs don't last anywhere near as long as hard drives do, making them also unsuitable for long term archival storage. And that is ignoring the vulnerability to scratches and/or sunlight. But I can see how they are better for distributing to others.

A quick search shows CD/DVD life expectancy as 2.5 to 5 years. Assuming you keep them in a dark enclosure.
http://www.archives.gov/records-mgmt/initiatives/temp-opmedia-faq.html
In my experience that is extremely optimistic for DVDs but also pessimistic for CDs.

Also, take a look at this old Anandtech DVD Writer review that tested write reliability:
http://www.anandtech.com/show/1528
 
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Optical drives are not worth it for archival purposes. Keep the data on a HD or flash drive, much less chance of getting damaged.
 
imported_Larry said:
I also want a raid 5 array using conventional disks to provide a large data archive area while editing photos or amateur movies
Click to expand...

Don't bother with RAID 5. You will enter a world of hurt. If you need a fast drive for editing espeically HD video, get a separate SSD. For storage I would just go with plain "green" cheapo green drives, no RAID but with a proper backup plan to external HDD.
 
beginner99 said:
Don't bother with RAID 5. You will enter a world of hurt. If you need a fast drive for editing espeically HD video, get a separate SSD. For storage I would just go with plain "green" cheapo green drives, no RAID but with a proper backup plan to external HDD.
Click to expand...

Video is the worst application for an SSD, since it is all sequential with lots of writes. You will wear level the SSD very quickly.

But, you are right to say to avoid RAID 5. The parity calculation causes a major write performance hit making RAID10 better for most applications (although video is sequential enough maybe this doesn't really apply?). Also I've seen studies saying that with the bathtub curve and the number of hours it takes to read the entirety of multi-TB drives, when a drive in a large RAID5 array fails there is a good chance of a read error from another drive before your array rebuild completes (so RAID6 is the new RAID5).

I think actually the various non-RAID pooling software solutions (FlexRAID, DrivePool, ZFS, etc) are going to replace conventional hardware RAID over the next 5-10 years.
 
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