The majority of hard disk drives sold today feature a serial ATA (SATA) interface, however, with some motherboards having difficulty with serial ATA optical drives, most optical drives sold are still ATAPI/IDE based. However, this is set to change with many international OEM/ODM clients such as Dell and Hewlett-Packard requesting the use of SATA optical drives in place of ATAPI versions. As a result, the SATA optical drive market may take over ATAPI/IDE in the second half of the year.
With Intel only offering SATA support on their recent chipsets, motherboard makers have to add additional components to support ATAPI/IDE, which means that adding this support increases the motherboard price. However, like the first SATA hard drives, the retail pricing for SATA optical disc drives is still around 20% to 30% more than ATAPI versions and as SATA's advantage to optical drives is only minimal where the SATA cable is more compact, it makes SATA more difficult to take on IDE with those who build their own systems.
Further info can be read in this DigiTimes report. Thanks to GristyMcFisty for letting us know about this news.
