Serial ATA has been developed as a replacement for the venerable IDE or ATA drive interface. It has many advantages inclding higher bandwigth and easier to use cabling. Most new computers are shipped by manufacturers using this new drive interface for hard drives, but optical drives still haven't switched over. A few companies have released Serial ATA products, but they are few are far between. The Plextor PX-716SA is on of the few DVD burners currently available with it.
The PX-716 model is actually available as both a Serial ATA (PX-716SA) and IDE (PX-716A). Specifications wise they are pretty much identical. Both are capable of 16x speeds for DVD+R, DVD-R and DVD-ROM media. It also supports 6x speeds for DVD+R DL media if it is using the 1.06 or later firmware. CD media is also supported with 48x speeds for CD-R and 24x speeds for CD-RW. Access times range from 100 to 150ms depending on the media type. The drives also feature 8MB of internal buffer or cache which is 4 times larger than most drives on the market.
Looking at the front panel of the PX-716SA, it looks no different from any other DVD burner. About the only difference is the lack of an audio headphone jack and volume control that are found on some drives.
