CowboySlim wrote:Functionally, SATA is mere hype and marketing spin on an optical drive.
That's only half of the picture. You are clearly thinking of the transfer speeds only.
Serial ATA's point-to-point nature and no need for half-assed bus arbitration protocols (slave/master on PATA) should ensure that the compatibility problems of having two opticals on the same channel are in the past.
If you haven't run into optical ATAPI drive compatibility problems when run on the same PATA channel, be thankful. I know how painful they can be, having tried several dozens of various drives from various manufacturers sharing the same channel.
Furthermore, if NCQ from SATA II is to be implemented on ATAPI devices, we could see additional higher burst transfers, lower seek times and lower cpu utilisation figures.
As a last point, if you consider that you can PCI bus arbitrate four devices using one IRQ (one SATA controller), you are actually saving resources with SATA. The same on PATA would require 2 IRQs and even then the devices would share the ATA channel.
Putting all this together, SATA is already as it is useful for ATAPI devices and can only become more so in the future.
regards,
halc