Optical SATA Drives?

[puntoMX]

Sony BWU-100A is their first product, they tend to mess up with the first product and then straighten it out.

That's very true indeed, and to straighten out the problems will take months; Sony simply doesn't make their drives them selves, this is why I recommend to stay away from Sony as far as you can get. I sell LiteON and LGE drives here, both brands work very well but I've never used them to burn off a blu-ray disk so I can't say much about that.

By the way, the 945 chipset needs a PCI-E 16x video card, something like the ATI HD4350 (or above), to get blu-ray displayed well, the onboard GMA 950 just doesn't cut it.

[Bushmaster78FS]

Sony BWU-100A is their first product, they tend to mess up with the first product and then straighten it out.

That's very true indeed, and to straighten out the problems will take months; Sony simply doesn't make their drives them selves, this is why I recommend to stay away from Sony as far as you can get. I sell LiteON and LGE drives here, both brands work very well but I've never used them to burn off a blu-ray disk so I can't say much about that.

By the way, the 945 chipset needs a PCI-E 16x video card, something like the ATI HD4350 (or above), to get blu-ray displayed well, the onboard GMA 950 just doesn't cut it.

Same thing happened with their GPS. When the first NV-U70 came out, I bought it and worked fine until the internal solid state disk got so defragmented, the device took minutes to even plot a route. Then I got their last of the series NV-U94T, it is better than most out there, I love it.

I think I am going to hold off on this whole blu-ray thing for now. I have a 8800GT which Cyberlink Advisor sees enough for the blu-ray, though generally speaking in my computer, the problem is the mobo, you can't go any further if your mobo is made in 2005, has limitations, and it's showing its age. I liked Sony's RC series, but Micro ATX by Intel is never good.

I just saw EVGA came with an amazing Micro ATX mobo, SLI capable with 6 SATA ports. I am now considering to upgrade the whole thing.

In Win7 when I have 5.9 WEI for everything my processor (PentiumD) score is 4.6... it's showing its age.

[puntoMX]

I just saw EVGA came with an amazing Micro ATX mobo, SLI capable with 6 SATA ports. I am now considering to upgrade the whole thing.

Or get a bigger case as well to fit something with more ports. Personally I like the new AMD CPUs and their chipsets and would give the best performance for the cash.

The ICH7 used on your motherboard now isn't bad at all, sure it's not as fast as a ICH9 or 10 but most of the time you will not even "feel" the difference. I sell systems with the ICH7 in combination with a blu-tay reader and a ATI HD4350 and all works as it should be (sure with a Vista OS).

[cluberti]

For what it's worth, that i945P board did ship with SATA II 3Gbps ports. However, I don't see optical drives saturating the ~133MBps transfer rates that PATA provides, let alone even worry about saturating even SATA I 1.5Gbps ports (let alone a SATA II 3Gbps port). Especially if you have hard drives you'd rather use in those SATA ports, which you seem to have, stick to PATA on optical media . One isn't better than the other, but there's no real "need" to go SATA for optical devices other than convenience (and to potentially remove PATA from a motherboard, which wouldn't be a bad thing) - there's no speed benefit at all.