Wednesday, July 05, 2006

Manufacturers shun SATA optical drives

The link above will take you to one of Charlie Demerjian's patented rants at The Inquirer. You may or may not want to read it. I enjoy his rants but some don't seem to.

He has a point, though. There is a serious shortage of optical drives using SATA interfaces. Those that do are simply IDE drives with a SATA adapter on the back and come at an unjustified price premium.

IDE is dead, dead, DEAD, or at least it should be. SATA trumps IDE in every way and the added cost between SATA and the legacy IDE stuff is negligable. So why don't we have SATA optical drives? Charlie puts it down to stupidity on the part of the manufacturers. I find it hard to be so blunt, but am unable to come up with a better explanation. Newer chipsets will have no legacy IDE support. It looks as if we're going to be living with motherboards that have no IDE support and only one or two makers offering SATA optical drives. They'll charge accordingly, as well.

I'm currently picking out a parts list for 2 high-performance desktops and this is a problem in the process.

Jack

No comments:

Post a Comment

All comments are moderated.

Note: Only a member of this blog may post a comment.