Are there any issues with using SATA instead of IDE for optical devices? I've read a few Newegg reviews that say this but they didn't explain why.
You are starting to see that with IDE devices now. Since some of the newer chipsets no longer include IDE, they've had to add chips that seem to be causing problems.
I thought that optical drives still cant achieve a data rate higher then IDE can handle, so there is no real performance benifit.
Most of the impressive bandwidth/data stuff we here about SATA are burst rates, there really is still no vast overall performance improvement here despite some impressive sounding math. It still more comes down to how fast those plates start up, and how fast they keep spinning. Or how fast the dvd spins, in this case.
The real major benefit of SATA as it pertains to most of us, is the cooling benefit of smaller cables, and cheapness of integrated RAID found on even the most basic of modern chipsets through SATA. That is ultimately it.
As it stands the bandwidth potential is largely unused and limited to the problems above... at least with traditional storage. That extra bandwidth is great for solid-state or other non-moving storage solutions.
The only *real* reason for using PATA as opposed to SATA is lack of support in the OS (either for SATA directly or the chipset the motherboard uses). However, this is a non-issue with Intel chipsets since the ICH5R and SR southbridges brought SATA support mainstream, or for nVidia chipsets since nForce 3 (again, SATA support is included at the chipset level). With the chipsets of both companies and Windows Vista, there is even less of a reason for sticking with PATA, especially in new contruction (or in the case of upgrading an existing Windows XP PC), as this operating system, like Windows XP with Service Pack 1 and later, not only explicitly supports SATA, but most of the SATA 3G feature set. Also, unlike PATA, SATA is a true point-to-point connection protocol (no more master and slave), which eliminates a major sticking point when adding a new drive (optical or otherwise). Finally, in addition to the dearth of PATA interfaces on new motherboards (the Q965 chipset from Intel doesn't have any!), there is a veritable *surplus* of SATA interfaces (not necessarily RAID, either) on newer motherboards (nForce 680i Reference designs, such as the EVGA nF-68-T1, have *six* SATA ports, none of which are RAID-specific, while all six *can* be used for RAID; this compares to my current ASUS P4C800E-Deluxe, which has four SATA ports, of which two can only be used for SATA RAID, and was new in 2004)
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