I've ordered a SH-D163B off ebay, but i'm not entirely sure how to connect it to my pc because I don't have any spare sata connections. Is there any way I can connect it to my computer (i'm about to buy a via 6421 sata card, is this suitable to connect the drive too?
Although, they can be slow and flakey especially with optical drives.
The card that you mentioned - VIA 6421 only runs at 1.5. Thats fine for optical drives as they top out at 20-25 MB a sec for 16-18x DVDs well within the first generation SATA range maxing out at 150MB/sec. Down the road if you upgrade your machine and by chance use the card to read hard drives, you will see a big bottleneck in performance with faster technology using PCI. Just sayin ;)
Also, Keep in mind you will have to check what power interface the new optical drive is going to have. Sometimes they have both SATA and molex, or just SATA, or just molex. Be careful to use one or the other if the drive has both :) If your power supply doesn't have SATA power, you will need to use this adapter --> http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16812816029
The best path would be just to get an expansion card and power adapter if needed. Let us know how the new Samsung drive works out!
Thanks, I just found out SH-D163B's do not work with 6421 pci cards... I've got a few spare IDE connections so I might just get an ide to sata connector.
