Re: Reliable Athlon 64 motherboards -- ATAPI drives with SATA converters

On Tue, 2006-03-21 at 23:16 -0500, Peter Arremann wrote:
> As for the SATA optical drive - nothing other than current Intel southern 
> bridges work (well) with sata optical drives. Most companies that currently 
> offer SATA optical drives produce them only to be resold to big OEMs and not 
> for retail. Anything non-Intel will give you issues.

Has to do with the fact that most SATA controllers have not supported
the full ATAPI spec yet.  Even Intel doesn't seem to either, but the
ATA-to-SATA converter on these ATAPI devices seem to know how to handle
Intel ICH5-7 SATA controllers.

Since these drives are just UltraDMA mode 2 (33MBps) with a SATA
converter inside, they buy you virtually nothing.


-- 
Bryan J. Smith             Professional, technical annoyance
mailto:[email protected]       http://thebs413.blogspot.com
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****** Speed doesn't kill.  Difference in speed does! ******