SATA Optical Drive

Oh man! Ad-blocking software has been detected! :'(

This website is run by the community, for the community... and it needs advertisements in order to keep running. Blocking our ads means your killing our stats!
Please disable your ad-block, or become a premium member to hide all advertisements and this notice.

I want to put a decent new DVD drive into an oldish pc - 5 year old Mesh with Athlon XP and asus mobo. The current cd drive is pata. Is it possible to insert a new sata dvd unit somehow with some fiddling or do I need to stick to a pata like the current unit?
Is it only possible to attach sata drives to newer mobos that support it?

 

Oh man! Ad-blocking software has been detected! :'(

This website is run by the community, for the community... and it needs advertisements in order to keep running. Blocking our ads means your killing our stats!
Please disable your ad-block, or become a premium member to hide all advertisements and this notice.

If it is 5 years old then I presume most of the internal slots are PCI. You should be able to get a SATA PCI card working in this unit, but, depending on the OS, drivers might be 'fun'.

IMHO on this unit I'd stick to PATA.

You need to look at the overall performance of the machine if you are hoping to play DVDs on it without stuttering.

Harry.

 

You could try a converter.

 

to be honest it isn't worth it get a PATA drive

I use a PATA Lite On LH-20A1P cheap and very fast... no problems .. (you can get a SATA version as well)

 

The actual difference between PATA and SATA as far as a DVD drive is concerned isn't that massive, bearing in mind if your motherboard is using ATA/133 its transfering at a theoretical maximum speed of 133 MBps and a 72x optical drive is reading at a theoretical max of about 10.8 MBps.

You may as well just get the PATA drive you know you can use and should you come to rebuild your machine and need to switch to using SATA for your optical drive you can just buy a bridge.

 

Agreed the only real benefits is the smaller cable for better air flow and possibly been able to hot swap a faulty optical drive in certain environments.

 

Thanks guys. I already had the SATA drive so I purchased a PCI card and a molex-sata adapter and we're working fine now.

 

I keep the SATA/PATA adapters on hand because I've got customers who buy a DVD burner on sale in the city, get it home, and realize that the cables just don't match up. They work like a charm and I've got 400% markup on the buggers.

 

*makes note to pick up some SATA/PATA adapters*