DVD drives go seriously S-ATA

THE LATEST ESTIMATES out of Taiwan suggest that S-ATA DVD drives will be more popular than standard ATA ones before the year is out.

That's down to the fact that big boys like Dell and HP are starting to ship all their new Vista systems with S-ATA optical drives.

Adoption of the drives has previously been slow, as many motherboard chipsets failed to adequately support the drives and this led to problems with Windows installation. We know, we tried.

But newer chipsets and the niceties of Vista mean that the bulky ATA cables can finally be dismissed as a retro-looking legacy. Indeed, most motherboards now only come with a single parallel ATA channel on board, as S-ATA is by far the dominant hard drive standard.

However, according to Digitimes, S-ATA optical drives can still be as much as 30 per cent more expensive to buy at retail than IDE. This may limit adoption in the enthusiast or DIY market until prices come down a little.

Given that the actual S-ATA interface is no more expensive to implement than IDE, this rather smacks of gouging, no? µ