Now that SATA is taking the hard drive world by storm, I guess it was only a matter of time before SATA optical drives (http://www.gamepc.com/labs/view_content.asp?id=opticalsata&page=1) started to appear, as they will surely become the standard one day. The vision is certainly a desireable one - no more annoying and bulky PATA cables to worry about at all, plus the increased speed and stability. Setup of SATA devices would be a lot easier and of course airflow gets better too.

To this end, Plextor has released the PX-712SA Serial ATA/150 DVD Rewritable drive, and MSI's the new X5AD2. Go here (http://www.gamepc.com/labs/view_content.asp?id=opticalsata&page=1) for a good, well rounded review of these interesting new products.

This is the best article I think I read today, I love these drives:

http://www.gamepc.com/images/labs/rev-opticalsata-msifrontSM.jpg

Look, isn't this amazing, look at all there is on the back of one of these things:

http://www.gamepc.com/images/labs/rev-opticalsata-plexbackSM.jpg

I think that is cool.

Since purchasing a nice pair of SATA HDDs that I made into a RAID 1, I've really been thinking about going SATA crazy and getting SATA RAID 5 for my entire disk system.

Naturally then, of course, you need to be getting DVD-RW and DVD-ROM as SATA as well.

Do you get PSUs that only have the SATA power connectors?

Well, the downside is that most mainboards have only two SATA connectors, and you can only plug one device to one connector.

Yeah, but motherboards are starting to come out with more, and you can get SATA RAID controller cards that take 8 devices no problem.

I plan on buying such a device, but only for 4 way RAID 5. Not 8 - I think that's totally overkill and probably makes a rackett and is hard to look after, RAID 5 or no. 4 devices will do me.

my thermaltake power supply comes with SATA power connectors out of the box.