Is there any interest among plextor users, on their way to update older writers, to invest in the SATA burner over the ATA burner??
The px712-A seems to have a good rep, around here anyway.
So my question is not about how much data can be carried but WHAT are you guys actually buying?? And why??
Both SATA and PATA interface of 712A are very good.
The problem is,which inertface do you want to use.
I believe PX-712A (PATA) may have a temporary advantage over PX-712SA (SATA), not in terms of hardware, but in terms of burning software support.
On many modern motherboards that support both SATA and PATA interfaces, the SATA port resources may be “non-legacy” mode, mainly to allow the PATA ports to assume the usual legacy resources, such as IRQ 14 & I/O ports 1F0-1F7 for primary IDE, and IRQ 15 & I/O ports 170-177 for secondary IDE. With a PX-712SA connected to a SATA port with non-legacy (native) resources, some burning software may not be able to detect the Plextor properly.
This means some burning software programs are in potential need of new enhanced versions that know how to scan for CD/DVD writers on SATA ports (in both native and legacy modes) as well as the usual PATA/IDE ports. Once these programs are able to provide proper support for SATA-based writers, then both interfaces should work equally well.
I don’t have access to a PX-712SA so I cannot assess the true compatibility of this drive with current burning software such as Nero, etc. I already own a PX-712A and a PX-708A, and don’t intend to purchase a PX-712SA purely for research purposes.
I have a PX-712SA at home but I still need to buy a PCI based S-ATA controller card because my motherboard (GigaByte GA-7VAXP) unfortunately doesn’t support S-ATA. Any recommendations scan80269?
Hi G@M3FR3@K,
I’m not sure I can provide good recommendations for SATA PCI add-on cards, but Promise has a SATA150 TX4 with 4 SATA ports and a SATA150 TX2plus with 2 SATA ports and 1 ATA133 channel.
Note that the PCI bus can be a performance bottleneck for SATA, especially with SATA hard disks. PCI bus has a peak burst rate of 133MB/sec, whereas each SATA channel has a transfer rate of 1.5Gbits/sec, so a high-performance SATA hard disk such as Raptor can score higher with a chipset-integrated SATA interface compared to a PCI SATA adapter card.
With SATA optical drives such as the PX-712SA, there should not be much performance difference, since even the 16X DVD read rate is nowhere near the bandwidth limits of PCI or SATA.
My motherboard is an ASUS P4C800-E deluxe with Intel 875P chipset, and I use the two SATA ports from the ICH5R southrbridge in RAID mode with a pair of SATA hard disks in RAID 1 with satisfying results. Intel was the first chipset manufacturer to provide SATA support and their SATA implementation tends to be the most mature and stable.
Thanks for your answers, guys. Exactly what I was looking for.
I will invest in the px-712A, when the time comes. I also have a motherboard with onboard SATA controller (ASUS A7V600).
scan80269 this was exactly my line of thinking, how to get the best from these onboard controllers. In the end I will use it for two Raptors, as I’m into music and video editing: Pro-Tools/Vegas/Sound Forge.
Thanks again guys.
Thanks for the information scan80269 