TechSpot - PC Technology News and Analysis

After surfing around for a while, I came across this little gem. Its the XA52P - 52x CD-R Writing / 24x CD-RW Rewriting/ 52x CD-ROM Reading / 16x DVD-ROM reading - and with a SATA connection! AFAIK this is the first combo drive with SATA and I don't even believe I've really seen even a regular CD-RW or DVD-ROM with SATA yet - certainly never touched one.

The shape of drives to come here.

Hopefully with the introduction of more CD/DVD devices supporting SATA, motherboard makers will start putting up to 8 SATA ports on a motherboard. Two ports just doesn't cut it.

Wow cool!! Yeah hopefully this will encourage the new SATA generation to evolve a big quicker.

Also tark, i think 2 is fine, most people arent going to have more then 1 harddrive, and with 2 ports you got room for a 2nd SATA HD.. and considering there is no floppy/cdrom SATA drives, I think two is good.

Looks like a waste of a SATA port to me.

Just kidding, although the bandwidth really is overkill for an optical drive. Then again, sure beats those big IDE cables!

Plextor has one thats out. They are supposedly the first.

Yeah Plextor are a really innovative and quick-off-the-mark company, I would not be surprised if they were the first with a SATA CD-ROM / DVD-ROM drive.

Plextor make the best, most quailty drives hands down.