Nathan Davis29 November 2006, 5:07 AM
Taiwan manufacturers are banging out more noise about their unpopular SATA optical drives, labeling Windows Vista as their ultimate saviour. But why, exactly, will Vista help them?
According to the ever reliable Taiwanese news-source
DigiTimes and its ever-stealthy sources of super-secret information, Windows Vista will increase the uptake of SATA optical drives.
No reason was provided as to why Vista will have this effect over any other supported operating system, such as Windows XP.
Instead, DigiTimes' sources obscurely said Intel's P965 chipset will have something to do with it, almost as if to say 'Quick, look behind you!'
This sounds more like the respective manufacturers clutching at straws and desperately trying to gain momentum by making some noise about the stagnant SATA optical drive market.
You see, there is a reason why even Blu-ray and HD-DVD 5.25-inch drives come in PATA flavour. Basically, there's just no one buying SATA optical drives.
It may have something to do with paying up to double the amount for something that isn't going to perform any faster nor deliver any immediate value other than a thinner cable which might allow for marginally better airflow in your PC.
Admittedly, the SATA and PATA prices are fast growing more-commonly comparable.
The potential speed boost is there in the form of a faster connection, but this will never have an effect on current optical media. CDs and DVDs can't even get close to such a speed -- even high-speed hard drives drool at PATA's bandwidth ceiling.
The only throughput benefit for hard drives is faster access to the cache built into the drives, but that's irrelevant for optical drives which have no such cache. Other benefits of S-ATA like Native Command Queuing also have no benefit with optical drives.
All of this is unlikely to ever change, due to a physical limitation which involves speed, an imperfectly balanced disc, and an explosion. Totally awesome as it may sound, this has been an unavoidable problem.
In the short-term, it's rather pointless to upgrade your PATA disc spinner to SATA, ignoring the slightly tidier case and vaguely better airflow.
However, there is a good, long-term reason and I've mentioned this previously. With a SATA optical drive-saturated market, motherboard manufacturers will be able drop PATA ports from at least some of their mobos. This, in turn, produces cheaper boards, thanks to one less controller and two or so less ports.
But the (non)buyers already seem well aware of this.