serial ata and optical drives

I was wondering if a motherboard supports serial ata hard drives, then what kind of interface does the dvd and cd (optical) drives use?

Thanks

Motherboards that include serial ata also provide normal IDE connections for existing devices. Due to how new the technology is there are not many devices other than hard drives that use it and therefore it would be stupid to have just serial ata connectors.

I read that the mainstream optical drives that use serial ata are coming out mid-2004.

cool... that would be good to see. Still if I upgrade my motherboard in a years time I don't want to have to replace my burner and dvd drive too.

true

Serial ATA... hmm, got to tell a story about that.

Bought components to build a PC for someone, ASUS m/board that supports ATA, then decided that I wouldn't need a floppy. How wrong was I. 2000 and XP can't load the OS onto an SATA drive without third party drivers, and guess what medium they come on? Well, actually it was a cd-rom, but you had to copy them onto a floppy as XP/2000 wouldn't load it from a CDR. Thing is, you need a PC to create a PC, which isn't a great situation... bit like the use Windows to create a boot disk for Corel Linux problem.

Anyhow, as a bit of an anecdote.. Win98SE could install directly onto an SATA drive, without any third party drivers... I'm trying to work out the logic here, if anyone can help me... weren't 2000 and XP released after Win98SE??

ATAPI drives are as of yet not supported in Serial ATA on motherboards, though that is coming. Some of the newer controllers can support it, though there are no native SATA optical drives out yet. Abit's newest revision(the original was only good for HD's) of their "Seriell" adapters will do that for you, if you have a SATA controller that can communicate correctly.

just to hijack this thread - BINKY - apart from needing a floppy for the drivers, were there any more problems with using the SATA as the boot device - im planning on doing this in the next couple of days (probably tomorrrow).

if ist going to be a headache i'll just use an IDE...

i have sold many computers with sata hard drives, I have used them and i like them but the only fault is that you have to have a floppy drive to use the driver disk. Windows installation asks for the drivers right at the start of the setup (its like press f3) once you do that then its pretty much like having a normal ide drive.