Resolved 2-port SATA PCI-E card

My mobo has 2 SATA connectors and they're both in use, 'cos I have 2 SATA HDDs.

My optical drive is starting to give me problems and may need to be replaced. My plan was to upgrade to a SATA multi-drive but I hadn't been meaning to do this before my next mobo upgrade (the latest mobos tend to come with 4 SATA connectors or even more) - and this is still some way off.

I could of course buy another IDE optical drive, but this seems to me to be going backwards, technologically-speaking. The other (stop-gap) solution might be to get a SATA PCI or PCI-E card. There's a Belkin product which seems to fit the bill. However, I'm very ignorant about these. They all seem aimed at people wanting to set up SATA RAID hard drives.

Can anyone please advise me about this? If I installed one and plugged a SATA optical drive into it would it work "out of the box "? Or are there problems?

 

Hello PeteC

I was only looking at internal drives and, yes, these cards have (usually solely) internal connections - so that wouldn't have been a problem.

You're probably right. Perhaps a better plan might be to get an up-to-date PATA drive and then the next upgrade could be to a SATA/HD drive - once the format war is over and the prices have come down enough. That could take a while, so the timing might tie-in with a mobo upgrade.

On a more general point, is it not the case that the IDE bus is now on the way out, to be entirely replaced before long by SATA? Or have I got confused?