Serial ATA has been around for some time now and there are plenty of chipsets, and motherboards, with a reduced number of PATA channels today. The harddrives market was quick to adopt the SATA standard, but the optical device manufacturers have been a lot slower. Most optical devices sold today are still using the PATA interface and now that new motherboards only offer one PATA channel thigns wil be really tight for those with multiple PATA devices. It finally seems like the optical market is catching up and during the second half of 2007 we’re expecting a lot more SATA-based players. The reason for this is that large PC builders like HP and Dell have started using more and more optical devices with the SATA interface.
Unfortunately this doesn’t necessarily mean that the retail market will see any major progression as the SATA players/writers are usually a bit more expensive than the PATA counterparts, despite the minimal production cost differences. This will hopefully become a springboard for the retail market where we will finally see a large assortment of optical SATA devices.
The cost structure and technological requirements for SATA is not significantly higher than those for ATAPI, the sources noted. In addition, recent chipsets from Intel have only offered SATA support requiring motherboard makers to use additional chips to support ATAPI/IDE on their motherboards, the sources explained.<
