Can somebody suggest me which is better sata or IDE optical drives?

What available empty connections do you have on your motherboard ? IDE or SATA ?

If you have both available to you, use the SATA. It's better and newer and fits better with todays technology.

I go with SATA as the cables are smaller and easier to hide in a case and keep the wiring neat. But if you had say 4 SATA controllers on your mobo and thought that you might want to use 4 hard drives...then I would ALWAYS make the optical drive the IDE drive. They are simply not fast enough to warrant anything faster.

It should be pointed out that many boards which have both PATA and SATA interfaces, whilst they do support SATA optical drives they do not necessarily support booting from them without a BIOS upgrade (if available).

SATA drives are almost always going to be faster, but as previous posters have noted, there can be problems with them on older boards. If you have a fairly recent motherboard and available SATA ports, go for it!

Actually as a hard drive whore (a lover of multiple hard drives) I still appreciate the IDE headers. I have two IDE Lite On DVD/CD drives hooked up via a single round cable and it is slick and works as well as a sata II connection. But the real advantage for me is it allows me to have all my Sata II & III headers available for hard drives and external connections. Today a lot of fine builds strive for a minimal drive approach so remaining available sata headers isn't an issue. My rig has a total of 10 sata II & III ports !

Dwarf said:

It should be pointed out that many boards which have both PATA and SATA interfaces, whilst they do support SATA optical drives they do not necessarily support booting from them without a BIOS upgrade (if available).

I've built probably around 100 machines that have SATA and PATA interfaces over the years and all of them booted off of the SATA DVD drive. that is how I'd load the OS. How many have you come across since you state that many boards won't boot from a SATA drive.

Perhaps I should clarify this point. When SATA was first introduced, it was primarily intended for HDDs and not optical drives. Hence the early production boards which had SATA support could only boot from SATA HDDs and not optical drives with a SATA interface. As optical drives with SATA interfaces became more common, manufacturers realised that booting support needed to be included. In many cases, this just required a BIOS update/upgrade.