IDE Blu-Ray Drives?

[drfsupercenter]

Hi,

Seemingly impossible to find these days are IDE Blu-Ray drives. But I need one. I want to be able to read/watch Blu-Ray on my computer, but all I have is IDE.

I found a site linking to this one, but since all the sites that sell it are in Europe, I'm wondering if it's maybe locked to Blu-Ray region B.

Anyone know of an *American* BD drive that uses IDE? I'd prefer one with DVD burning, but if all they have is read-only I'd settle for that too.

[PurpleDemon]

Hi drf,

Do you have room for a PCI card?

You could have SATA that way.

I might be wrong, but I think the European Pioneer you linked to is SATA

[admin]

The one in your links seems to be a SATA drive as well.

All I found were these:

http://www.unityelectronics.com/product-product_id/4748

I also found this, but I'm suspicious as to whether it really is ATAPI or not:

http://www.compsource.com/pn/BDC2202B5PK/Pioneer_550/

The Pioneer site, and other stores, list it as SATA, but some stores also list is as ATAPI/IDE. You might want to send an email to the store to confirm the IDE connection before buying.

Also, external drives could be an alternative (or external SATA enclosures for SATA drives that connect to your computer via USB 2.0).

[PurpleDemon]

Yeah that second one looks pretty sweet. It is at Amazon HERE

I don't understand that as well. They say SATA, but interfaces as ATAPI? I am lost as well. Definitely e-mail first.

I even could not find an image of the back of it. Thanks for the find Admin. This might be good Blu-Ray player for me as well.

[admin]

There's a video review of this unit, and it actually shows the connection as SATA:

http://www.metacafe.com/watch/1229625/pioneer_bdc_2202b_blu_ray_disc_dvd_cd_combo_drive/

Unless there's an ATAPI version?

[gs47]

I have an old PC with no SATA and as Burrell suggested, I bought a PCI card that added internal SATA slots and one external. (I use the external for fast backups with an external enclosure HDD). Don't need the expensive RAID versions, just to add a port or 2 for optical or HDD use.
It worked just great, was cheap, plug and play.

That would surely give you much more selection on Blu-Ray drives...

[ed klein]

The reason you don't want an IDE optical drive for reading/writing of the Blu-ray format is because of SPEED.

SATA drive are much faster than IDE drives, and with movie only on Blu-ray disks at 17gb to 29gb you want a fast drive for backing-up the movie only on any size blank media, BD-5, BD-9, or BD-R.

Also, the blank Blu-ray disks at 25gb are getting burn rates faster all the time, currently at 2X, 4X, and now 6X also requires a faster drive.

And, if you re-encode Blu-ray format to fit on a 25gb blank disk (with compression) a 23 hour period is very common with a very good picture quality with just an average CPU setup.


Any even with a semi-performance LG GBW-H20L Blu-ray optical drive, 3.2 gh CPU, 500GB SATA hard drive (7200rpm) and if I must re-encode to fit on a blank 25gb blank disk still 16 to 17 hours of re-encoding time.

Get the fastest hardware you can get.

[drfsupercenter]

I don't see what the burn speeds have to do with it... I can burn CDs at 48x using IDE just fine... or DVDs at 8x...

I don't have room for a SATA controller! I already have an IDE controller for my hard drives, and the other two PCI slots are taken up as well. If someone could get me a good USB external drive for around $150 (or less), then maybe I'd consider that route...

But I swear, when Blu-Ray came out, there were tons of IDE drives. Half were IDE, half were SATA. Did the SATA folks successfully erase history here and make it so all you can get is SATA? Not even eBay can help with my search.