Hi I am building a new machine, that will consist of a SATA hard drive and SATA DVD-RW. My question is: If the mainboard has built in SATA support (ie SATA Raid Controller), does that mean SATA devices can be bootable? Reason I ask is because i'm curious if the BIOS will detect the SATA CD-ROM, and will I be able to install an OS with it. Thanks in advance.

I was with you until the SATA CDrom part. To answer the first part. Yes the SATA HD can be bootable by installing the SATA drivers before the OS. I don't think there are SATA drivers for any version of windows except WinXP and possibly 2000. As far as SATA CDroms are concerned, I don't think they exist. Also, I think the SATA controller wouldn't be able to run at only 33MBs/sec. I could be wrong about that. To my knowledge there is no way to connect optical drives to SATA. The MBoard will have at least 1 IDE channel to serve 2 drives. Most have 2 IDE channels just like most MBoards. The main advantage of SATA is faster thruput with a dedicated channel. This would be wasted on the current optical drives.

Plextor makes a SATA DVD-RW drive: http://www.newegg.com/app/ViewProductDesc.asp?description=27-131-329&depa=0 It's relatively new, and as far as I know, it is the only SATA optical drive on the market.

Good question. I didn't buy a SATA CD drive because of that, and because I didn't want to waste a sata port for a cd/dvd drive. "...but in my defense, it was dark, I was drunk, and it was delicious!"