SATA takes on PATA in DVD-burning extravaganza

WHETHER YOU LIKE it or not, new chipsets are gradually throwing away the old IDE (PATA) connection, with its almost universal compatibility. Most new boards have only one IDE connector left and, by the time the X38 chipset comes, don't be surprised to see mainboards with none.

So, what can you expect from the new wave of SATA optical storage. Besides slimmer cabling with less clutter, is there any other advantage to it? Maybe, a bit extra performance?

Here we check out Asus' new unit, DRW-1814BLT, to see if there's any gain.

The DRW-1814BLT looks like any other optical drive, except that the SATA data and power cables are, simply, far smaller and neater. The specs, of 18x writing (and 16x reading, haha!) on DVD-ROMs, as well as other formats, each with their specific max speed, are common across most new drives in the market right now.

The unit offers Lightscribe capability for those unwilling to print CD stickers on their inkjets, but write to the CD laser for that cool paint job. The drive can also record DVD+-R DL discs at an acceptable 8X rate.

In our 3.33 GHz XeonUP 4-core reference machine, we sat the drive next to a Shuttle drive of similar performance. We ran Nero CD/DVD storage test on both, here are the results in the screenshots.

As you can see, there's little difference, even though we ran a 800MB DVD on them, i.e. not going really higher than, say, 6X speed in real read - the drives are still far slower than the interface limits of either PATA or SATA interfaces, and the same would be valid at 16X max read speed at the outer rims of the disks.

Interestingly, despite similar top speeds, the Asus drive betters the Shuttle in CPU usage metrics, quite a bit at that - even at these fairly low speeds. The PATA showed the same top burst speed, whether we used ATA33 or ATA100 cabling - I suspect the real drive limit is ATA33 anyway.

Out of curiosity, we also plugged the SATA drive into the new kid on the block, the Intel V8 eight-core heat source. The BIOS didn't recognise the drive at all until we switched the SATA mode from AHCI to legacy. So, keep in mind other platforms could have further compatibility quirks with the new drives.

In summary, the SATA interface brings nothing from the drive performance point of view, except 2.5 times higher cache burst speed - even that would be zero if you compare it against native ATA100 DVD unit. The CPU usage seems to be somewhat less, however. More importantly, the cable clutter is severely reduced, and removal of thick IDE cables from the mainboard, usually right in front of hot memory DIMMs, does help better system ventilation quite a bit. So, performance is just OK, but the ease of installation is a big plus here. µ