IDE-DVD to SATA, or ATA133.

[The_Outlander]

I'm considering connecting two IDE-DVD burners (adapted to SATA), to a SATA PCI card. The only two SATA ports on the mobo are connected to hard drives.
The mobo supports ATA133 Raid. (UltraATA) 4 ports.

Which is important, bandwidth or speed given the application, i.e. watching movies and burning disks.

http://www.tomshardware.com/2004/07/09/msi/
In fact, Serial ATA does not entail any extra performance in and of itself - contrary to what is often propagated in innumerable marketing brochures. At the current maximum 150 MB/s, only the interface itself offers a good deal more bandwidth than UltraATA at 133 or 100 MB/s. But there are still no drives that can approach the maximum bandwidths of the UltraATA standard. Anyone solely interested in fast transfer speeds can continue to do without Serial ATA - unless you're dealing with a Western Digital hard drive with 10,000 rpm.

I have no intention of upgrading the equipment to 300MB/s SATA.
In bold, the "interface itself" offers etc bandwidth...... no drives....approach the maximum bandwidths of the UltraATA standard. How do they differ, in what respect, the sentence is not clear?

And while I think of it, having already converted two IDE hardrives to SATA, was it worth the trouble (plug-in adapters).

[bigtomrodney]

There is no benefit to converting the devices, they have their built in speeds. The speeds referred to for SATA/IDE are the theoretical maximum. SATA/IDE converters arer really only for convenience in place where there is no choice of controllers.

The reference in the quote you have supports this - the drive interface (i.e. the channel in which in communicates) can transfer at greater speed but current CD/DVD drives cannot provide data at a rate fast enough to make any change to performance. This in addition to the fact that adaeters only allow operability, they do not change the fundamental communication of the device.

[The_Outlander]

Thanks bigtomrodney,

On the basis of that the only way to gain any real advantage in performance is to buy dedicated hardware.
Are there limitations to the use of PCI cards to support hardware not natively supported by the motherboard? Is this the proverbial sows ear.