Recommend DVD burner: SATA vs. IDE?

wilburpan · l33t Joined: 21 Jan 2003 Posts: 977

I'm putting together a new computer, and I was wondering about getting a new DVD burner. My old computer is old enough that this will be the first DVD that I'll be setting up with Gentoo.

Can anyone recommend a SATA DVD burner that works in Gentoo? Or should I stick with an IDE DVD burner, and if so, which one?
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frostschutz · Advocate Joined: 22 Feb 2005 Posts: 2977 Location: Germany

Any IDE or SATA burner should work fine. Problems can arise only with cheap / buggy controllers; for example my brothers machine has an ASUS A7V880 board (I think, it's some Athlon XP board), and his SATA burner does not work with the onboard SATA controller; but it works fine with a PCI sata controller that uses another chipset. As long as you don't get one of these buggers you will be fine, so you should investigate more on the controller side (is the mainboard Linux compatible or not) as the burner devices themselves are not a problem.

If your new machine comes with plenty of SATA ports I'd choose SATA because it is cleaner (IDE cables take up so much space!) and avoids problems such as two IDE devices that are connected with the same cable cannot be used at the same time (performance cut in less than half). Also note that with the move to SATA, the quality of onboard IDE controllers seems to degrade (that's the case on my intel quadcore board). If it does not have plenty of SATA ports and you want to use them all for hard disks, and you're not planning to use any IDE devices, you may choose an IDE burner but make sure that it is the only device on the bus (i.e. don't connect another device to the same IDE cable).

We're using a Samsung SH-S183A (SATA) and an old NEC 1300A (IDE), both devices run just fine in Linux.

micmac · l33t Joined: 28 Nov 2003 Posts: 996

I recently setup a ASUS DRW-1814BLT using the AHCI chipset driver and kernel 2.6.22.x. Already burned some discs, no problems there. It's also nice for audio extraction because it doesn't cache audio data, offers C2 pointers and has a small sample offset (6 samples IIRC). It's also quiet when playing DVDs (spins down).

dbc · n00b Joined: 07 Jun 2007 Posts: 50

Check what kind of IDE support the mother board has. I've recently built a couple of SATA-centric systems with newer motherboards that provide IDE via the Marvell legacy PATA I/O chip. I was re-using ATAPI CD-ROMs from the bone pile, which is how I made the decision to go with ATA CD. Back on topic: The Marvell chip is somewhat lame. The live CD only boots with the kernel parameter "all-generic-ide". I can burn CD's without any problem, after building a kernel with appropriate drivers. So there is no fundamental barrier to using an ATAPI CD-ROM, it's just that the lame Marvell chip has provided two or three interesting speed bumps along the way. YMMV.

-dave

wilburpan · l33t Joined: 21 Jan 2003 Posts: 977

Just a followup: I wound up getting a Samsung SH-S183L. It worked just fine. I went with an SATA DVD drive mainly because of the Marvell chipset issues that Dave mentioned above (My motherboard is an Intel DG965WH, which uses the Marvell chip for PATA support.).
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I'm only hanging out in OTW until I get rid of this stupid l33t ranking.....Crap. That didn't work.