SATA drives and SATA DVD drives
 

I have been thinking about upgrading my drives, both magnetic and optical, with SATA drives. Does anyone have any recommendations or cautions for particular drives to use or avoid?

And what about speed improvements? Have people noticed significant improvements either in regular usage or in benchmarks?

TIA
Dominic

Speed improvements? That depends on what you're upgrading from. I have a fairly recent Maxtor PATA 16MB cache 7200RPM and it isn't any slower than my Western Digital SATA drives. My 500GB Samsung Spinpoints are somewhat faster but don't think that they run like Raptors. Now if you upgrade from 5400RPM drives with only 2MB cache, yes, then speed improvement will be noticeable.

I recommend checking newegg.com for reviews on hardware. Many times you can tell what items are good or not by what other people are saying and how many are saying what.

How about LG?

http://www.ncix.com/products/index.p...s&promoid=1016

This drive does DVD+/-RW, Dual Layer, and LightScribe. Has anyone had any experience with LightScribe under Linux as well? I've used lightscribes on Macs before and they're pretty nice for whipping off discs that look more professional then the usual sharpie labels.