On Tue, 16 Dec 2003 16:43:40 GMT
John H. wrote:

On Tue, 16 Dec 2003 07:13:55 -0500, "J.Clarke"
wrote:
(strange there aren't any SATA optical drives on the market yet).

Nothing strange about it--most of the SATA host adapters currently
on the market don't support ATAPI devices, nor do most of the bridge
chips, and the ones that do are only guaranteed to work with the
same brand host adapter chip.

Philips demoed one over a year ago saying "We are very proud to be at
the leading edge of the Serial ATA transition, and helping demonstrate
the interface_s outstanding functionality, reliability and performance
with our latest DVD+RW drive." So much for leading edge - we're still
waiting for a Philips SATA DVD drive.

And Phillips is probably waiting for everybody to start using the host
adapter chip that is compatible with the bridge chip they used in their
demo.

There's no real benefit to SATA for opticals
anyway--their bandwidth doesn't come close to filling a parallel ATA
pipe and the drives don't generally get hot-swapped so the only gain
would be the longer cable.

SATA is the *replacement* for ATA. That's reason enough. Mice and
keyboards don't need the bandwidth of USB either.

When it replaces ATA then it will be the replacement for ATA. That's
not going to happen until somebody starts producing southbridge chips
with built in SATA and no PATA. And I suspect that that won't happen
until there is serial ATAPI standard agreed upon.

--
--
--John
Reply to jclarke at ae tee tee global dot net
(was jclarke at eye bee em dot net)