Cache. Does 6mb make a big difference over 2mb?

[nox5wood]

I have a plextor 716sa with a 6mb cache. I am looking at getting building another computer and most dvd burners have a 2mb cache. Does it make a big difference or should I not worry about it?

[celtic_druid]

Well it makes a big difference if you drain it. With a 6MB buffer the burner can go without data for 3 times as long. Makes no where near the difference it used to though since all burners now have burnproof type technology where they can resume burning if the buffer drains. Plus with faster PC's the buffer is less likely to drain anyway.

I mean my old Yamaha 6x CDRW drive had a 2MB buffer. My Plextor 12X I think had 4MB's. If the buffer ran out on the Yamaha though, you had a coaster and media was a lot more expensive back then.

No speed problems with my Pioneer or Benq 16X DVDRW drives though and they both have 2MB buffers. Think I have a Lite-On 52X CDRW with a 1.5MB buffer somewhere and that was fine.

[Chewy]

I made a lot of coasters with a plex 712 and a few with a 708, due to poor firmware support from plex. My 40-45$ burners with 2 meg cache burn good disks on more medias, buy 2 non plextor burners. Save sata for hard drives.

[celtic_druid]

I had a SATA MSI combo drive that was excellent (until it died). Personally I would like to see more SATA optical drives. It's time to phase out PATA.

[Chewy]

Even at 22MB/s(16x/dvd) we are only using 2/3 the speed of dma2/ata33.
We've got to get up to 100-150MB/s to saturate the pci bus. Over at cdfreaks a similar argument showed NO advantage to sata in performance of optical drives, and remember sata's don't share. 2 sata chips only give you 4 hard drives, some mobos are going to only a primary ide, not good.

[nox5wood]

Celtic,

What pioneer dvd drive do you have and have you had any problems with it?

[celtic_druid]

A 109 and a 110. To be honest I don't really use them.

I am not saying that optical drives need SATA, just that you can't get rid of PATA if companies don't stop making PATA optical drives and start making SATA ones.

There are for instance MB's with the standard 4 SATA2 ports plus a SiI3114 giving 4 extra SATA ports and the SiI3114 handles ATAPI drives fine. That's 4 HDD's and 4 optical drives.

I don't need PATA and the cabling that goes along with it.

I think the problem is that all these SATA optical drives (MSI, Asus, Lite-On and Plextor) were released too early. Then discontinued now that you don't have to have an Intel MB to use them. Don't think that Lite-On and Asus ever even released theirs.