Plextor 712A - first 12x DVD+R

[silentphoenix]

I@m not sure if these are out in the UK yet, buy just read a review on Anand Tech and seem pretty slick: ther reviewer says "the 712A is essentially a 708A on steroids".

Plexy have bumbed up the buffer to 8mb again, and the original release will be PATA, but other revisions will be SATA.

The DVD-R is still at 8x mind you and the DVD+/-RW was left behind at 4x, but they've upped the CD buring speed to 8x.

Out of 9 piece of media, they only managed to get 2 to run at 12x (not bad since all the disks were rated for 8x use methinks), and one particular ricoh disk only did 2.4x .

So what'll be the cost of owning one of these babies when the're out? $200 in the US, so we should expect these to retail at about £500 in PCW

[Bindibadgi]

WOOT SATA optical drives!

Does that imply SATA ATAPI for the OS in general or is it specific plexter drivers?

[MadAsABadger]

agreed, SATA optical drives are a big step in the right direction. Think how long IDE has been around, it really is dated technology.

I hear that Serial ATA II is round the corner and that it will give us 300Mbps, rather than the current 150Mbps.

I currently am really impressed with my WD Raptor 74GB which is SATA and runs at 10,000RPM - I cant imagine what it will be like when they have a 300MB version

You can find out a bit more on SATA II from Toms Hardware

For the more hardcore nerds who actually understand the full tech stuff you can try the body behind the SATA standard and view the real info

If you really dont understand SATA I can give you a real basic idea:

Parralel was thought to be the way forward, think of it as a wide highway, with data going along in several lanes rather than one. This has many advantges, however as data needs to reach the destintation in order there overheads of organising it each end were high, slowing down the advantages.

Serial sends the data down one lane but in the correct order (less overheads) and at a higher speed.

The same has happend to printing (paraller printers now rare, USB are standard) for the same reason.

Someone more technical may want to correct me here!

[Steve]

While the benefits of SATA are clear, especially with ease of installation and thin cabling, I do not think SATA II is a big deal for the desktop market... yet. Firstly, drives don't use the 150MB/s they have already, so 300MB/s isn't going to make that much difference (except on decent RAID) and secondly, unless your SATA controller is on the southbridge itself, rather than stuck on the PCI bus, you'll only get 133MB/s out of it anyway (presuming you have a 32bit 33mhz PCI bus, of course.)

edit: Oh and that drive looks nice - I greatly prefer installing SATA drives over PATA, so when I get a DVD burner I'll probably look for SATA.

[Stoo]

Yah, by far the best thing about SATA so far is the cabling, we'll have to wait a while before speed really becomes much of a factor.

Nice drive, but it's still hard enough to come across decent 8x stock still, let alone 12x capable

[Jonny M]

And Plextor are quality

[MadAsABadger]

i think you are misisng the point, the cable is a benefit but not the feature. this year we see many new motherboards, next month sees the release of PCI Express boards, later in the year BTX form factor.
The change to SATA may not happen overnight but it will, and it will be big. SATA II is a step in thr right direction, it is important for these development to continue - not just to get people constantly upgrading and spending their money with us retailers (although that is nice!) but to keep the market competitive and drive research and development.

[Steve]

True, I think SATA drives will be seen more in the latter Q's of this year in more mainstream systems, as PCB production prices come down to the same as PATA. However, what we don't want is the same situation as wireless networking - where we get quicker and quicker, and less compatible, lol. Still, SATA is far more governed than wi-fi, so there's no real danger of that happening.

[MadAsABadger]

as good as SATA drives are they do cause a great deal of extra support with end users. many our our customers buy SATA (as prices are only a few quid extra to IDE) and then phone up having no idea how to get them up and running.

It would help a great deal with microsoft tackled to auto detection of SATA in windows set up.

We always try to help but the SATA set up and drivers come down to the motherboard, and there are several chips and drivers - nightmare.

I recommend that complete newbies stay away for the short term unless they have access to some advise or are keen to learn (these things tend to improve as technology becomes established). We have posted a brief guide on our forum but I think that will need updating.

Anyone else have issues setting up SATA? Have any problems getting SATA to work alongside IDE Hard drives (they often try to boot from the IDE first)

Imagine trying to boot from a windows disk in one of these new SATA optical drives?

Cheers

[Howard]

SATA? Cool. Won't have to replace any of my existing drives.

This is why I didn't purchase a 4/8X DVDRW. Lol.

[Bindibadgi]

I hear that Serial ATA II is round the corner and that it will give us 300Mbps, rather than the current 150Mbps.

I currently am really impressed with my WD Raptor 74GB which is SATA and runs at 10,000RPM - I cant imagine what it will be like when they have a 300MB version

Itll make absolutely ****-all difference. Youll get a nice burst from the cache which is <1% of your drive space, then itll be slooooooooooooooooooow.

The cabling alone is exactly what im looking forward to. The speed increase will make even less difference to optical drives.

The problem is SATA isnt native to a winOS yet, which makes it bad for installing a system onto (i have no floppy drive) and crap for people who dont understand what drivers are. I spose, as long as the BIOS supports SATA optical drives you could get as far as booting a win cd off of it, dunno how it would take to it after that. We're not gonna have the old: /d:mscd000 trick are we?

[silentphoenix]

I agree with what bindi said about the speed increase for optical drives - even if they were running on a 600Mbps SATA-III (when it comes out ) it wont really make much difference given that the current limitation is not really the bandwidth of the cable being used, but rather the actualy capabilities of the drives.

BTW, how long are the longest cables you can get for SATA - longest ive seen are about 60cm, which was too short for having a drive near the top of a chieftec midi tower with my K7N2G-ILSR which has its SATA ports right near the bottom of the board!

[Bindibadgi]

SATA is easily a couple of feet, external SATA is the same as internal iirc just a different connector.

[Swafe]

different connector ? isnt sata sata ?

what id do it put a hole in my case and a long sata cable and then run it thru the whole

cheap and effective, works for me

[zhenboy]

when will it be on the market in the uk?

[Agent]

The NEC 2500 with firmware flash to dual layer is looking like a better buy at the moment