UPDATE: Added commentary regarding Plextor's PX-712A optical drive.

Microstar International, a company mostly known for its mainboards, graphics cards and servers, recently unveiled its new XA52P optical drive that is one of the world’s first CD/DVD combo drives intended for Serial ATA interconnection.

MSI’s XA52P optical drive can read and write CDs at 52x, burn CD-RWs at 24x and read DVDs at 16x speed. The product has 2MB internal buffer and a special technique called SuperLink to avoid buffer underruns. XA52P supports 650MB, 700MB, 800MB and 900MB compact-discs. MSI also includes different front-panels for its drives with every XA52P allowing to match the drive with almost any type of case.

While Serial ATA-150 can deliver higher bandwidth compared to today’s Parallel ATA-66 and 100, optical drives are unlikely to require that additional bandwidth in the near future, keeping in mind the ongoing transition to Serial ATA, the switch of optical drives to the new interface is inevitable.

Earlier this year Plextor unveiled its PX-712A optical drive that can read and write both CDs and DVDs and should more expensive compared to MSI's combo drive.

At this point MSI certifies its new optical drive to work only with Intel’s ICH5-series of I/O controllers found on the majority of mainboards based on i875P, i865PE, i865G, i865GV, i865P and i848P chipsets.

MSI declined to provide information on availability dates and pricing for its XA52P optical drive.