Will my ultra speed + cd-rw drive work faster on a SATA bus (as opposed to an older ATA bus)?

Answer 1

Well you'll definitely have more bandwidth with a SATA bus meaning potentially more data can transfer through the cable at a time. The bottleneck is going to be the read speed of the drive and how fast the CD spins and is able to read it. My guess is that any CD-RW is not going to benefit much if any from SATA (150) over IDE (100-133) because the limitations of the physical read speed of the disc in the drive. Hard drives have much faster access times than CD drives in comparison.

Also, if your drive is native IDE and you are using an IDE-to-SATA adapter you are not going to benefit at all with an adapter since it all that does it take an existing IDE connection and allow it to connect to a SATA plug. It cannot turn an ATA 100/133 device into a SATA 150/300 since the drive itself only is capable of IDE.

Answer 2

Although the SATA bus is faster than ATA (or, correctly, PATA/IDE), I believe that you'll find your CD-RW drive only has a IDE/PATA connection on the rear of it. You can easily check this. IDE/PATA data port is approximately 2" wide, whereas the SATA data port is about 1/2" wide. (half an inch).