Seagate to Drop IDE Drives by Year End

ianare writes "Seagate plans to cease manufacturing IDE hard drives by the end of the year and will focus exclusively on SATA-based products. Seagate is the first major hard drive manufacturer to announce such plans, though others will likely follow suit. That's not to say support for the 21-year-old PATA standard is going to vanish overnight; similar to how ISA slots were available long after most of us had ditched our old ISA peripherals."

Comments

Gone missing?

[Burdell]

Nothing for you to see here. Please move along. I didn't know Slashdot was stored on IDE drives!

You'd think they'd know better

[Anonymous Coward]

Dropping hard drives can really damage them.

Re:You'd think they'd know better

[Anonymous Coward]

I lol'd, someone mod myself up...

Re:You'd think they'd know better

[Mike89]

Lucky the Seagate consumer drives have a five-year warranty ;)

Re:You'd think they'd know better

[thegnu]

Lucky the Seagate consumer drives have a five-year warranty ;)
and employees get six. ---joke
                                                        ^
                                                        |
                                                      joke

You really need a monospaced font to get the full effect of this.

Re:You'd think they'd know better

[thegnu]

shit. I must escape the lt's

and employees get six. &lt---joke
                                                      ^
                                                      |
                                                  joke

Re:You'd think they'd know better

[ZachMG]

well since the drop is gunna take so long i think they must be dropping them from pretty high.

Does it really matter?

[TheRealMindChild]

I mean, I have to go out of my way already to get a board that "supports" PATA. Hell, the last board I bought with PATA ports WOULDN't BOOT them... BY DESIGN. Even then, you'll get some RAID capability on the SATA ports, but not PATA.

Re:Does it really matter?

[EvanED]

There are still a lot of people out there with older computers you know. My mobo doesn't even have SATA ports, let alone no or poor IDE support.

(That said, I have a PCI SATA controller and two SATA drives, so...)

Re:Does it really matter?

[Mikachu]

Excuse me, but my primary computer is still an Athlon XP 2600+, with only IDE slots. I'd have to install a PCI card, which I could do, but I'd prefer not to go out and buy one. It's not unexpected that they would discontinue the manufacturing of IDE drives; I've thought the master and slave system felt outdated since I first learned about it at the age of 6 (I'm 16, give me a break). My point, though, is that IDE is far from dead. For some people, it does matter.

Also, you can get RAID compatibility with PATA. I have a board that has it onboard.

Re:Does it really matter?

[CastrTroy]

Exactly. Good riddance. It's not as though these things are in high demand. Sure some company will keep on producing them for people that are into legacy hardware, but I fully expected that the main manufacturers (Seagate, Maxtor, WD, et al) would stop producing these things eventually.

Re:Does it really matter?

[Dunbal]

The Amish still use horses and buggies and don't want anything to do with those new-fangled horseless carriages. Your point is? Technology moves ahead. Stay with your system, or upgrade. But no one will stop progress because you complain.

Re:Does it really matter?

[timeOday]

no one will stop progress because you complain.

On the contrary, PATA drives will certainly continue to be made if people continue to buy them.

Re:Does it really matter?

[jimbug]

does this mean if I use IDE I can grow a beard now?

Re:Does it really matter?

[voss]

I just bought an HP A6110N which is an X2 4400 system. I have my SATA booting windows and I installed a 120gb IDE drive from my old system booting linux switchable in bios. It only has 1 PATA port so its primarily for legacy. I suspect a number of manufacturers will keep an ide port for legacy purposes at least on towers.

Re:Does it really matter?

[Anonymous McCartneyf]

Okay. Now, who will dig out that player for those old NASA tapes from '69?

Re:Does it really matter?

[PenguSven]

How can you buy what they aren't making/selling? You monkeys all enjoy your old PATA drives. I'm sure your copy of DOS 6.2 with BIOS v.912.34.110, DIN keyboard and Serial mouse will work wonders. for the rest of us, we can accept that technology progresses (SATA, EFI, USB/Firewire, Bluetooth, but obviously nothing coming from Redmond) and enjoy the advantages those progressions bring.

Re:Does it really matter?

[Ucklak]

Floppy discs are still widely available; phased out but still available.

Re:Does it really matter?

[Nazlfrag]

Reminds me of that lonely ISA port MB makers sometimes still slap on at the end of the PCIe/AGP/PCI slots. It's as quaint as those RS232 ports they have next to the 4 USB connectors. Yeah, I predict there will be a lonely IDE port probably near the floppy port just for old times sake, probably until they ditch the floppy port (ie. no time soon)

Re:Does it really matter?

[Anonymous Coward]

"...we can accept..."

"we"? Whether I agree with you or not, YOU don't speak for me, dope..

Re:Does it really matter?

[tdelaney]

The motherboard I just bought for my server (DG33TL - bearlake) has no motherboad port. It's got the solder points, but no port.

I haven't put a floppy into a new machine for over 2 years. And I don't own a USB floppy drive either.

The floppy is finally going away.

Re:Does it really matter?

[Anonymous Coward]

sez you. I say he does speak for you, so just stfu, zitbrain.

Re:Does it really matter?

[Captain Sarcastic]

I hate to say it, but you're probably right (my handle notwithstanding).

Most of the non-Slashdot crowd don't swap out motherboards - they buy ready-made systems that already have SATA-compliant motherboards, and will use CD-NET to swap their TaxCut files/Quicken files/MP3's/pron collections from their old machine to the new one, and then put the old machine as garage-sale fodder.

It strikes me as rather wasteful... but I don't see much alternative.

Re:Does it really matter?

[Kadin2048]

Also, you can get RAID compatibility with PATA. I have a board that has it onboard.

I have bunches of perfectly good PATA RAID cards sitting around that I just haven't gotten around to (read: afford) buying drives for and loading into systems. Guess I should start snapping up whatever ones I can find.

I'm a bit bummed by the news. SATA is nice, but it's really only compatible with systems and equipment made in the past ~3 years. There's a LOT of hardware around that's older than that, and frankly I think that most people are getting to the point where they're getting sick of the upgrade treadmill. It's going to be around for a while.

Re:Does it really matter?

[Martin Blank]

I have a brand-new Biostar motherboard sitting next to me booting and running from PATA, and a cursory glance over current motherboard models on NewEgg shows that they all have at least one PATA port available to them, which is required because the number of SATA optical drives available was, until relatively recently, pretty small, with only Plextor producing them. Now that you can get them from Sony, Lite-On, etc, I expect to see PATA ports start to drop away, but they're still quite common.

Aside from that, integrated PATA ports have to be bootable, because every major OS now uses installation from optical media. I'd be interested to know which board does not support this.

Re:Does it really matter?

[timmarhy]

i'm sorry but are you comparing the difference between sata and ide to floppies and cd's or dvd?

what shit, pata it almost as fast as sata drives, and has fuck all limitations either beyond hot swap, which hardly any sata drives can do anyway

Re:Does it really matter?

[Don_dumb]

I have the opposite problem to the one you want to know about (so not really that helpful, but anyway)
My old MSI-KT4 Ultra (I think) mobo has two SATA raid ports which can be used for booting but they state that those ports only support hard disks. I haven't tried to see if optical drives do still work in them (as of course, I do not have an optical SATA drive) and this is a problem as I need a new DVD drive and want to buy SATA if that is the way things are going but I am not quite ready to fully upgrade everything.

Re:Does it really matter?

[TrebleMaker]

does this mean if I use IDE I can grow a beard now? You can try, but it probably won't help as much as waiting three more years.

Re:Does it really matter?

[Depili]

All SATA drives are hotswappable, it's part of the sata specification, only most linux sata-1 controller drivers lack hostswap functionality, sata-2 almost universal hotswap support on linux.

Re:Does it really matter?

[fbjon]

what shit, pata it almost as fast as sata drives, and has fuck all limitations either beyond hot swap, which hardly any sata drives can do anyway The cables of PATA suck donkey's posterior: they're large, unwieldy, and are messy no matter how you round them or tuck them. Also, they use molex connectors which tend to be like teen pussy: so tight that once you get in you can't get out. Lastly, hot swap with SATA has always worked for me.

PATA has nothing going for it.

Re:Does it really matter?

[fbjon]

Yep, no serial port on my ASUS board either. You have to plug a cable into the pins on the board itself. Only one IDE port too, but a large number of USB ports instead, up to 10 I think, if you plug in extra cables.

Speaking of that, the board can boot from USB sticks, and can also flash its BIOS from USB memory. Floppy is dead, long live floppy!

Re:Does it really matter?

[Anonymous Coward]

No, he doesn't.

Re:Does it really matter?

[Tony Hoyle]

SATA is a mess of incompatibility.. most BIOSes won't boot off SATA without enabling boot ROMs and the like and they increase the boot time to minutes (on my server there are no less than three boot roms for the SATA, two of which are mutually incompatible (the raid and non raid ones - if you enable both you get no SATA at all). Then try loading an OS that supports them.. you need to use a damned *floppy drive* on Windows just to get the boot drivers in. On Linux you often need the very latest kernels... that server needs 2.4.20 minimum otherwise it won't boot (it was *fun* getting xen on there).

It's way too early to be dropping IDE. Wait a year or two until the manufacturers have at least decided on a standard.

Re:Does it really matter?

[tdelaney]

D'oh - that should have been no floppy port of course.

It's got pins for a serial connector, but you'd need such a long cable that it's not feasible. So I'm looking at grabbing a USB-to-serial to plug my UPS into.

Re:Does it really matter?

[Wite_Noiz]

Seriously? How old is your hardware?

I have a GA-K8NXP-SLI (2005) and that boots off of my SATAs just as fast as my old PATAs. True, the RAID controller for my non-boot SATAs takes a few seconds; but that's normal for a RAID ROM.
I realise this is more of a consumer board than server, it just seems odd to me that you can still be having such issues two years on.

Also, I've installed both XP-SP2 and Vista Home Premium directly on to my boot SATA without needing an extra floppy.
I admit I was worried about this (in the past, I've had trouble installing to SATA; and I don't have a floppy drive), but it was completely transparent.

The cables are the deal winner/breaker. SATA cables are a massive improvement from the oversized PATA/Molex ones, but I've yet to find a make of cable that actually feels sturdy enough to survive frequent plug/unplugs.

Also, why didn't they think about allowing drive daisy-chains, when they drew up the SATA spec? Not needing to attach each drive directly to the mobo would be a real space saver.

Re:Does it really matter?

[Anonymous Coward]

If you haven't already got a beard, or at least some designer stubble, I, for one, won't be employing you to look after my computer systems.

I only employ REAL geeks, and I KNOW what they look like!

Re:Does it really matter?

[Winckle]

If you don't mind me butting in, I used to test the USB to Serial adaptors for brainboxes, since they manufacture in my home town. They worked well for me, though I was admittedly using them in a testing environment. Anyway, the website is http://www.brainboxes.com/

Re:Does it really matter?

[KoldKompress]

http://www.nliteos.com/

1) Download nLite
2) Download your SATA drivers
3) Burn nLite with your SATA drivers, graphic drivers etc all installed
4) ????
5) Profit!

I don't have a floppy drive in my desktop. To get around my SATA drives needing the drivers for Windows, I've always used nLite.

Re:Does it really matter?

[Anonymous Coward]

"I imagine you think a serial or parallel port is 'legacy hardware'"

Yes, it is.

"but they have no more-modern equivalent"

Yes, they do. It's called USB.

"and are essential for interfacing with certain external hardware."

Then just get a USB-to-Serial adapter. Problem solved. A minority of people pay the extra cost for something the majority doesn't need. That's the way it should be.

Re:Does it really matter?

[Lumpy]

If you look closely you will find many Amish that "cheat" Telephones hidden on the property and a Dish Network satellite dish carefully placed so that it looks hidden.

a buddy of mine that does service on dish network has 3 Amish farms he will get called to to "um" fix the TV signal. He drives a plain white van so they can tell the other Amish he was a county inspector. Many of the Amish only have t he outward appearance of shunning technology. Many in private are enjoying the 24/7 stream of decadence,porn, and smut we call TV.

Re:Does it really matter?

[JayAEU]

Technology moves ahead. Stay with your system, or upgrade. But no one will stop progress because you complain.

You can progress all you want, but I'm quite confident that there's still a lot of demand for new PATA devices, albeit for upgrading existing systems.

At home, I really don't envision replacing half a dozen computers perfectly capable of working a few more years, just because I can't get a replacement PATA harddisk to fix them, should the need arise. This is not progress, it's polluting the environment and wasting my money.

Re:Does it really matter?

[TheRaven64]

It's as quaint as those RS232 ports they have next to the 4 USB connectors. None of the relatively modern machine I own has an RS-232 port, and it's the one 'legacy' connector I miss. You can divert the console to the serial port (even in DOS, by the way), run a machine headless and still be able to trouble-shoot it when the network breaks. The really depressing thing is that several of these machines still have parallel ports, which I haven't used for a very long time.

There are a few other things that need RS-232, including my UPS (for monitoring) and my little firewall box (PC Engines WRAP; console goes to the RS-232 port). It's also the easiest PC port to connect home-made hardware to (not something I've done for years, but I do wonder what school children use these days).

Re:Does it really matter?

[afidel]

If they are New Order Amish or Mennonite then there's no problem with them having tv, only the old order Amish still hold strict beliefs about not using electricity.

Re:Does it really matter?

[macs4all]

Hmmm.

My 2 year old G5 PowerMac boots offa SATA just fine, thank you!

Of course, it uses Open Firmware, which, IMHO, is vastly superior to BIOS. Whether its vastly superior or not to EFI...

Re:Does it really matter?

[neoprint]

What? You're posting on slashdot, how do you know what pussy is like?

Re:Does it really matter?

[Dunbal]

it's polluting the environment and wasting my money.

      Exactly. Progress. Oh - you thought it was supposed to help YOU? :-P

Re:Does it really matter?

[bomanbot]

Also, they use molex connectors which tend to be like teen pussy: so tight that once you get in you can't get out. That has to be one of the weirdest analogies I have ever seen on slashdot ;-)

Re:Does it really matter?

[jonesy16]

Unforunately, like most things in the enterprise, there will still be a demand for PATA for years to come. Hell, even Apple's current xServe RAID assemblies only use PATA drives and they're not alone. Enterprise tends to extend the life of things that most consumers just assume get rid of due to incredible age.

Re:Does it really matter?

[Kjella]

I've never had a problem with the SATA connectors, even though I hear of several people that have managed to break them. And I work mostly with Shuttle XPCs which aren't exactly spacy. I've had them come undone a few times but that's better than excessive force being applied to the connector, if you ask me. The only time I can recall having a near-fatal accident was in a mixed SATA-PATA environment, because the "yank" when you loosen a molex connector causes all kinds of hell with all the other cables. In a clean SATA environment, connect/disconnect the cables with no use of force and thus no damage or accidentally disconnecting anything else. Perhaps not idiot-proof but if you're not an idiot, a lot better to work with IMO.

Re:Does it really matter?

[Anonymous Coward]

Must be another 13 year old cross over from digg, as he clearly knows nothing about teen pussy. Unless maybe he's a dad. :)

Re:Does it really matter?

[CompMD]

So by extension are SCSI cables evil as well? Usually its the power connector that is troublesome to disconnect also, not the data connector.

Well, heck, if you want to play the "ease of connection" card, reach back in time and remember three letters: SCA.

Re:Does it really matter?

[dfghjk]

You are confused. SATA works without a single change to legacy software. Just because your systems are a pile of poorly implemented, non-standard disk interfaces doesn't mean that SATA itself has compatibility problems. SATA can't control crappy host implementations.

Re:Does it really matter?

[dfghjk]

The biggest limitation of PATA is that the data on its cable is not parity checked. Data transfer errors can occur undetected.

SATA was not created to make a faster interface than PATA, it was created to be fast enough, backward compatible enough, functional enough, while being cheaper and more reliable. It does all those things. PATA needs to die.

Re:Does it really matter?

[Akaihiryuu]

Oh, on new systems I'm all for dropping PATA (except it's still harder to find SATA DVD(RW) drives (compared to PATA ones anyway). But I've got some older computers still running (Linux servers, mostly headless ones) that don't have SATA, and it would be nice to be able to find replacement hard drives for when the ones in there eventually die. The hard drive is pretty much the only component in those computers that's "guaranteed" to fail eventually (other than fans).

Re:Does it really matter?

[slimjim8094]

Ugh... 16 here too. I bought a laptop about 6 months ago, with SATA drives, and I've fixed desktops with them.

What I don't get is: who decided SATA? I know that it's superior in some ways (better connectors, eSATA) but ATA/IDE works fine. Are people really hitting the cap on data transfer with them? I thought the bottleneck was still the mechanical platter...

Good

[Espectr0]

At the least, this will drive the price of SATA drive down. Maybe it will be the same like RAM, where DDR2 is actually cheaper than the old DDR memory standard.

Re:Good

[CastrTroy]

All of us with DDR RAM are pretty bitter about that. I was pretty bitter about a year ago when I tried to buy SDRAM. That stuff is expensive. Still, I can hope that we can go back to the good old days (march 2001???) when SDRAM was $CDN 30 for 512 megs. That was when RAM was the cheapest it has ever been, at least considering how much you could do with 512 MB back then. Now that's that won't even get you the shiny desktop on windows vista.

Re:Good

[wanderingknight]

Last time I bought a hard drive, the SATA price was the same as the IDE price. I'm not living in the US, though.

Re:Good

[arkhan_jg]

The reason old memory is more expensive than it was is because it's old and scarce. Hardly anybody makes it any more, so the mass production economies of scale and competition that drove the price down have gone, and the prices have risen in their absence. It's like old car parts; they might have been common as muck on the road 30 years ago, but now they're a 'classic' car and the parts can be pretty hard to get hold of, and expensive because of it.

As for cheap RAM... $CN30 is just under £14. For £12.89+tax I can get 512MB of basic DDR2 PC4200 which is an order of magnitude faster than that old SDRAM - not bad for rip off britain! Progress forever marches on...

Re:Good

[Carewolf]

No. DDR2 is cheaper than DDR because it is slower and cheaper product. Unlike SATA which is a more convient and potentially faster product.

The producers of harddrives will naturally atempt to abuse the transition from one technology to the next to raise their profit margins. Since the number of harddrive manufactors has dropped sharply, I think they will succede.

Re:Good

[CastrTroy]

Yeah, but 512 MB doesn't do so much for you anymore. Back then 512 MB was all you needed, and if you got 1 Gig, you were swimming in RAM. Now 1 Gig of RAM is the least I will use on a desktop. If I was running Vista, I'd probably want close to 2GB.

Re:Good

[afidel]

SATA drives should have been cheaper almost from the getgo. One of the big reasons to go serial was to drop the complexity of the controll chips, simpler chips are smaller and hence cheaper. Add to that the fact that there's less material used in the physical interfaces and connecting the chips to the interfaces and SATA is simply cheaper to produce.

Re:Good

[hairyfeet]

My less than 2 year old laptop only has 512mb installed. With Xandros 4.1 Pro with 1/2 dozen windows open and all the 3d pretty on it is still smooth as butter,response wise. I think that is why the big name hardware manufacturers are slow to offer Linux.Microsoft bloat means new machines and hardware upgrades for existing ones. I know that if I still ran Windows on my laptop I'd be looking at a new machine (board only supports 1.25GB of RAM) but since switching to Xandros I see no pressing need to even upgrade the RAM. It's not the RAM,it's how you use it.

Off Topic-I know a lot of folks badmouth Xandros for the Microsoft deal,but it is a really nice distro,IMHO. It is the only one I've ever had set my laptop up flawless out-of-the-box,and the latest version even set up the bcm43xx driver for my broadcom 4318 perfectly. While I've tried nearly 60 distros so far in the hope of finding a free one to recommend to latop users,I've yet to have one give me a perfectly running laptop on initial boot like Xandros does consistently.

Re:Good

[Ravenscall]

DDR2 Prices are not bad. I just picked up 2 GB of DDR2 667 for $80 US.

Oh fuck.

[r00t]

What will I do when my drive dies again?

I happen to like my computer. Being fanless and well-built, it is quite reliable except for the damn hard drive.

Re:Oh fuck.

[Aranykai]

You can then buy a non-seagate(read: crappy) hard disk from any other manufacturers.

I honestly think this is a good move. I mean, if you cant get an Parallel ATA Disk anymore, just get a SATA controller. You can keep your computer, fanless or otherwise.

Re:Oh fuck.

[EvanED]

You can get a PCI controller card for $30 or so. I have two SATA drives, and most of my computer (including motherboard) is 5 years old, just as SATA was hitting the market, so I don't have integrated support.

It's not ideal, but it works plenty well enough.

Re:Oh fuck.

[Dahamma]

http://sewelldirect.com/SerialATAtoIDEConverter.as p

Re:Oh fuck.

[m4k3r]

Perhaps your hard drives are overheating ? Installing a fan may help :p

Re:Oh fuck.

[Anonymous Coward]

Dear r00t,

If your hard drive fails, how about replacing it with another one? Just a thought. There ARE other hard disk manufacturers besides Seagate. And there are SATA extension cards, USB hard, Firewire hard disks, Flash disks etc. so you can friggin' REPLACE YOUR FAILED HARDWARE if neccessary. If you really, really need replacement for Seagate PATA disk, buy them now, store and replace when neccessary. And when you're feeling hungry, go eat something. Put something warm on, it's a chilly day, my child.

Re:Oh fuck.

[cgenman]

Please note, that this is more than just a joke. I've made a lot of "silent" machines over the years (I was a quiet computer consultant for a while), and it's relatively easy to quiet a CPU or PSU safely. Most CPU's have thermal controls that will let you run more or less fanless, and with PSU's you just overbuy and underdraw.

But the Hard Drive is always the problem. HDD's don't generally have thermal protections, and the kinds of problems you're likely to see with hard drives are the ones that show up six months to one year after setting up the machine. They also can get quite hot inside without triggering external heat alarms.

Run your machine for a few hours in its normally concealed environment. Then touch your Hard Drive. If it's warm enough that leaving your fingers on indefinitely would cause mild discomfort from heat, you need to add protections. I'd generally recommend a shielded air tunnel from your HDD, up over your CPU, and out your PSU, with a pair of undervolted lo-flow panaflo's driving the configuration. YMMV.

The best stuff for this, if you happen to not know, is probably still the forums at Silent Pc Review.

Good luck! By the way, the slower Maxtor FDB's are only a hair louder than the Seagate Barracudas, but are a lot cheaper and more widely available.

Re:Oh fuck.

[dwater]

...on the same web site :

http://sewelldirect.com/IDE-to-SerialATA-Converter .asp

a little pricey, IMO, but it's there if you want it.

Re:Oh fuck.

[flyingfsck]

Well, maybe you should add a fan to cool the HDD down???

Re:Oh fuck.

[r00t]

An add-on air tunnel is NOT happening. This is a Mac G4 Cube. See wikipedia if you don't remember.

I buy drives according to the electrical power they consume, plus wanting 7200RPM and the biggest size that doesn't exceed the system's limit of about 134 GB. Right now I have an ST3120814A. Electrical power means heat or noise, assuming these things don't emit stuff like light and X-rays.

Apple provided a nice central chimney with a heat sink for the drive. It looks good. Of course I'm running 24x7 in a room that is often just above 80F (27C).

The drive is at 48C right now, with worst ever being 55C. (according to the SMART data, if I read it right)

Re:Oh fuck.

[AnyoneEB]

Is that really necessary for most people? Most the new (desktop) motherboards I have seen have plenty of PATA and SATA plugs. Certainly PATA will eventually be phased out in favor of SATA (like ISA has disappeared as far I can tell), but such an adapter seem extraneous for the time being unless you have some non-standard setup -- in which case you would probably buy an SATA PCI card instead.

Re:Oh fuck.

[EvanED]

Read the rest of this thread. r00t has a G4 Cube, so no onboard SATA and no room for a PCI card.

This adapter would probably actually work for him, unlike the PCI controller idea.

Re:Oh fuck.

[dwater]

Well, I was thinking of myself. My mobo has 4 sata ports and 4 ide ports, and they each have something plugged into them. If one of my IDE drives dies, then I have to buy an SATA drive, but I still have to use it on an IDE controller.

Actually, that's not the setup I've got at all. I have my 2 system drives (RAID1) and CDROM on the mobo's IDE ports, and a PCI 4 port IDE controller for the 4 IDE drives. The latter 4 IDE drives are part of a RAID5 with the 4 SATA drives. So, I could buy an SATA PCI controller and, gradually as the IDE drives are replaced with SATA drives, move them from the IDE PCI controller.

So, no, it isn't for 'most' people, but it's there anyway. Not sure what you mean by 'non-standard'....

Re:Oh fuck.

[networkzombie]

What will I do when my drive dies again?

Well, you shouldn't have bought Maxtor drives to begin with.

Re:Oh fuck.

[Hal_Porter]

The drive is at 48C right now, with worst ever being 55C. (according to the SMART data, if I read it right)

55C is actually just at the edge of the operating temperature range

http://episteme.arstechnica.com/eve/forums/a/tpc/f /24609792/m/857003655731?r=274009295731#2740092957 31

I suspect that the running drives hot reduces the life - I got a new machine a few years ago with crap cooling, and installed two 7200rpm drives I've had two drives fail in two years. One was a Deathtar admittedly but the other was a Maxtor and they are supposed to be ok. I actually added a WD SATA drive, and had the same symptoms as the above poster and the drive was easily over 55C. On the old machine I never saw a single fail, and after I put more fans in the new one to keep the drive temperature at around 35C I've never had a problem.

So I can't prove it, but I think the increased hard drive fail rate I and a lot of other people saw around the move to 7200rpm was because the drives cooked themselves to death. It's not entirely the drives fault of course, modern PCs have a load of high power components packed very close together. Look at the trend in CPU and GPU power consumption over the last ten years. Oddly enough PATA cables make it worse by obstructing the air flow. I think the crap way most PCs are assembled with a tangled mass of cables, poor airflow and no chassis fans, combined with all components increased power consumption means it's now very easy to build a PC where the hard disk will cook.

Re:Oh fuck.

[r00t]

The converter seems to need an inch of room. While I do have IDE and power cables, they don't move much more than a circuit board would. They are in-the-middle connectors on tighly fitted cables that go from motherboard to DVD player.

I was really hoping for 128 GB solid state to come out with IDE connectors. That would allow one final replacement, good until the computer is truly an antique.

Re:Oh fuck.

[cgenman]

Ah yes, the cube. While I loved the form factor, those things were notorious Hard Drive easy-bake ovens. I get nervous over 110f (about 44c) for most drives, and as you can see yours is well above that right now.

I'd fork the HDD's molex and throw in a voltage regulator + the aforementioned fan. The cube was really not ready to be fanless. One 7v FDB fan is going to be inaudible in anything but laboratory conditions, but dying HDD's are a real pain.

Re:Oh fuck.

[Dahamma]

I was really hoping for 128 GB solid state to come out with IDE connectors. That would allow one final replacement, good until the computer is truly an antique.

Ok, then I completely change my post. If you are willing to buy a 128GB SSD (which will debut at a good $2+ I imagine) then - once your PATA HDD dies - BUY A NEW SATA MOTHERBOARD. And before you complain that your perfect tiny mobo is PATA only - I don't care. You want to spend that money, you can track down a PATA IDE drive for many years to come.

Re:Oh fuck.

[Corporate Troll]

Can you boot from it? That's a minimum feature, you know....

Re:Oh fuck.

[JayAEU]

Can you boot from it? That's a minimum feature, you know....

I know some of my computers can't boot from controller cards, so they'll be dead in the water once PATA disks are no longer available.

Re:Oh fuck.

[Corporate Troll]

That's why I brought up the point. I have ample experience with SCSI, but I know you have to take a SCSI adapter that can boot, otherwise you're still dependent on an IDE boot disk.

Re:Oh fuck.

[Aleksej]

If you worry about SATA cards and IDE hard drives availability, you still have the time to buy spare IDE drives.

I'm going to buy a SATA drive, though, because I don't really doubt KT7A-RAID won't take a PCI SATA card...

Re:Oh fuck.

[Rick17JJ]

The computer that I built myself about 1 1/2 years ago, is almost fanless too, but it does have a small water pump which is a moving part. It has a Zalman fanless water cooling system for the CPU and for the Northbridge chip. It doesn't use water cooling for the video card, because I was able to find a fanless video card which gets by with using heat sinks instead. It also has a fanless Antec power supply, although I probably could have got by with using their less expensive model which is a high efficiency power supply with an almost silent fan. I have a case fan, but can use a knob on the front of my computer to adjust its speed and noise level to something acceptable. It is a very quiet computer.

Zalman Reserator 1 V2 is a fanless water cooling system

I am not a technician or an expert, but I suppose it would be possible to build a computer without a hard drive. I do know of a company which offers the option of plugging a 40-Pin Solid-State Drive into the IDE connector on almost any appropriate computer's motherboard to create a WiFi hotspot controller. Not having tried that myself, I am not specifically recommending that to anyone. I am not sure if it allows for lots of constant rewriting like a hard drive or not?

• Solid state drives
• 40-Pin Solid-State Drive

Here is an example of a computer which, if I am not mistaken, can run Windows XP or Linux from a 1, 2, or 4 GB compact flash (CF) drive. They also offer the option of using a hard disk. I don't know anything about their products and it is not a real powerful computer. I am just using it as an example. I am also not sure how well this compares to hard drives for constant rewriting and heavy usage. As I said, I am not a technician or an expert and don't know much about any of these alternative devices.

Norhtec MicroClient

Re:Oh fuck.

[Rick17JJ]

Oops, I looking back at what I was responding to, I see that I misread what he was asking. Somehow, I thought that he was saying that he wanted a system that did not have any moving parts. In the above response, I was thinking that was what he wanted. I was reading way too quickly and misunderstood the question.

As for what he was actually asking, I suppose he could just stick a SATA controller card in one of his PCI slots and hook the new serial-ATA hard drive to it.

Re:Oh fuck.

[suggsjc]

Then just but a lot of drives, and replace them as needed
Mixed Drives
More Mixed Drives
Sorry I couldn't find an all IDE auction, but there are usually some every now and then.

And while your at it, you can pick up some of that DDR RAM someone else was complaining about
Lots o Ram

Re:Oh fuck.

[Anonymous Coward]

That's not just funny, it's the bloody truth!

Re:Oh fuck.

[Tim Browse]

I suspect that the running drives hot reduces the life

Google released some info about statistics on their hard drives recently - see here.

Relevant part:

"and there is less correlation between drive temperature and failure rates than might have been expected, and drives that are cooled excessively actually fail more often than those running a little hot."

That's not to say drive temperature has no effect, of course.

Re:Oh fuck.

[Anonymous Coward]

I love it when repliers censor the parent's topic. It's hilarious. What do you think you're doing, even? Nobody here on Slashdot cares. You're not even the one saying it, so I don't see how it should make you feel uncomfortable.

Re:Oh fuck.

[Hal_Porter]

Hmm, the link seems down.

In another comment -

http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=255669&cid=199 93375

I found some paper about PVT actuator reliability which says it obeys the Arrhenius law, where (presumbly failure) rate is proportional to e^T.

But maybe the the keyword is "excessively". 35C seems like a little hot, 55C seems like a slow cook. Less than room temperature seems like excessive, perhaps because of water condensation or thickening of the lubricants which protect the drive. So perhaps the total drive fail rate (as opposed to the PZT actuator fail rate) is lowest at room temp and increases exponentially as temperature increases.

And anecdotally, drives running at the top end of the temperature curve seem to fail faster as I mentioned. I'm actually not sure of the details, but I think chemical processes cause the fail, whether in the PVT actuator or elsewhere. And those all speed up with temperature.

what?

[Anonymous Coward]

People don't use ISA peripherals anymore? What am I gonna do with my kickin' Sound Blaster 16 then?? I can't just let that baby go to waste!!

What about osdev?

[Anonymous Coward]

I am currently writing a kernel that will depend on IDE (ATA, now called parallel ATA) for hard disk drive access. I will be using pio mode 0 (around since ATA "Advanced Technology Attachment" cam from the IBM AT) for the best compatibility with both old and new i386 compatible machines. What does this mean for kernel programmers doing small projects to learn? How much hard is Serial ATA to use from the kernel's perspective? Is it backwards compatible with the old PATA?

- The captcha is "faceted."

Re:What about osdev?

[larry bagina]

As a consumer, I'd rather get rid of the legacy shit (ATA, ps2 keyboards, bios, DOS/Windows :-). But for hardware hacking/os writing, a USB stack, firewire stack, etc are more work (and don't provide the immediate feedback like 100 lines of assembly to read the raw keystrokes).

You an still have fun with an ARM breadboard kit, though :-)

Re:What about osdev?

[Anonymous Coward]

If I remember correctly, SATA does not have a standard interface for kernels to use but many controller vendors follow Intel's AHCI interface that is software compatible with standard PCI bus master IDE controllers.

Re:What about osdev?

[EvanED]

If it does turn out to be an issue, you could always play around in a virtual machine. I very strongly doubt VM support for IDE is going anywhere for the foreseeable future.

Re:What about osdev?

[yvajj]

Depending on how you're written your IDE code, it should work on most SATA controllers + drive, since most SATA controllers also operate in compatability mode.

I recently tested my IDE driver on a SATA controller + drive and it worked without a problem.

Re:What about osdev?

[thebear05]

is the bios legacy shit ? if yes please explain

Re:What about osdev?

[thegnu]

If I remember correctly, SATA does not have a standard interface
Out of curiosity, did IDE have a standard interface when it started, or did everyone adopt the most popular one? I'm guessing that the field was less of a cluster[pillowfight] back then, but it still seems like there'd be no reason for it to be any different than it is now... IA64, AMD64, for one example. SATA's just a wee baby yet. It'll standardize, becuase it would be a big absurd pile of crap if it didn't. And big stupid piles of crap are bad for business, unless of course they're called Windows.

(I must be given props for delaying the Windows-bashing for so very long)

Re:What about osdev?

[AnyoneEB]

Yes, that is why Apple computers use EFI instead. Linux has had EFI support for a while, and Windows has it in some versions, although that page says Vista currently does not support it. According to that article, some x86 computers already ship with EFI using a BIOS legacy compatibility layer (including Macs for Boot Camp to work), and it links to an Intel page saying that they are in the process of switching over to EFI (once again with BIOS compatibility for now) for their motherboards. I suspect EFI will mostly replace BIOS on new hardware within a few years.

Re:What about osdev?

[Mike610544]

As a consumer, I'd rather get rid of the legacy shit (ATA, ps2 keyboards, bios, DOS/Windows :-)

I fear for the day when PS2 ports go away. Without my Model M I'd probably have to stop using computers altogether. How people can type on modern "keyboards" I'll never understand. They can have my PS2 port when they pry it from my cold dead hands.

Re:What about osdev?

[ThePengwin]

Grab a USB to PS/2 converter :) that will solve your problems for eternity!

I only recently went to USB keyboards, only because the Logitech G15 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logitech_G15) is a USB hub as well :), but i will still defend to the death PS/2 ports. Why waste a USB when your keyboard has a dedicated port for itself?!?!

Re:What about osdev?

[Anonymous Coward]

I believe SATA needs to be addressed at the BIOS / driver level. So you could probably hack a PATA - SATA Driver in the place of your current interface.

Re:What about osdev?

[OrangeTide]

Well Intel's SATA interface has become the standard and at least some vendors are duplicating the interface (while providing an extended interface of their own). Also the cards have ROM, so if you're writing something for 16-bit real mode you can just make normal bios calls to your favorite ide, scsi or sata controller.

It's sad that it's far easier to use an Ethernet card at the lowest level than it is to use a USB host controller.

If I were to write an OS from scratch I would probably only implement support for SATA for the start. I would have every block device go through a SCSI abstraction. It would only support 64-bit on x86 version of the OS. I figure by the time I finished the OS, that IDE, 32-bit, PS/2 and what not would be obsolete (it already sort of is). I'd probably not even support AGP and only pci-e style memory apertures.

To be honest the days of easy hardware hacking are over on the PC. I think for that kind of thrill you need to pick up a Nintendo DS, PSP, etc.

Right now I'm toying with the idea of making a cheap hacking "game system/home computer". Apparently Winbond makes an all-in-one chip for making those direct-to-tv toy game systems. 27MHz 65816(same cpu as SNES and Apple IIgs, it's like a 16-bit Commodore-64), sprite memory, generic I/O pins(nice for hooking up to an MMC/SD socket), and other goodies.

I probably won't get anywhere with the idea unless someone wants to chip in to invest in the idea so we could put enough systems together to sell on Thinkgeek or something.

It would be like the XGameStation or Hydra in terms of being a learning tool/hacker toy, but a fraction of the price and more like a real game system than some weird collection of off-the-shelf chips.

Re:What about osdev?

[Hal_Porter]

Why would you change though? Bioses are only used for booting these days

http://www.missl.cs.umd.edu/winint/index2.html

A few equipment query functions and a lot of INT 13 calls to read sectors off the disk. And INT 13 supports 64 bit LBAs which will last essentially forever - drives of upto 8 Zetabytes ( 8*(2^70) bytes ) are possible.

The original reason for EFI was because Itaniums needed a firmware standard because the Bios is x86 only. Macs use it mostly to stop people booting OSX on normal PC hardware as far as I can see.

There's a good reason for not using EFI too. EFI graphics cards need to have EFI byte code in Flash along with a normal x86 Bios unless they want to only work on EFI systems. That means more flash memory. Or the installation utility could copy the EFI driver into a FAT formatted EFI system partition, but that means if something corrupts it the card will stop working on a legacy free EFI system.

Actually, come to think of it, video bioses are a special case. On Windows XP, the driver can use Int 10 to call the video bios.

Hmm, it seems that this is disabled on Vista -

http://72.14.235.104/search?q=cache:URuKNsrXQDAJ:d ownload.microsoft.com/download/9/c/5/9c5b2167-8017 -4bae-9fde-d599bac8184a/WDDM_BIOS.doc+int+10+windo ws+vista+driver&hl=en&ct=clnk&cd=1&gl=us

So it seems like the Bios is used so little and is so futureproof that it doesn't do any harm to keep it. It's also small and simple and can run purely from Rom, whereas EFI needs a special partition which could be corrupted.

Re:What about osdev?

[OrangeTide]

We call the oldest simplest IDE controller a WD IDE controller, this is why some BSD's have /dev/wd* for the block device name. Western Digital created the original spec for IDE. Some people mention Compaq creating the controllers, I don't know where they get their information from. The simplest IDE controller for ISA can be made from off the shelf components. You pretty much just need a few 74LSxx series components. AND or NAND gates, address decoder and a tristate line driver. Assuming you have a 16-bit ISA bus, for 8-bit ISA you need a couple more chips. I have some of those very old controllers (no DMA support, PIO only!), they are amazingly simple. All the complicated bits are on the harddrive itself, which needs some complicated bits anyways to control the heads and decode the tracks.

Re:What about osdev?

[Solra Bizna]

Why waste a USB when your keyboard has a dedicated port for itself?!?!

Why dedicate a port when you can just add another generic port for whatever the frell the user wants plugged in?

-:sigma.SB

Re:What about osdev?

[cortana]

The ghastly PC partitioning system and the horrible kludges that we have to perform to get our PCs to boot are a weight around our necks. But things have been this way for so long that some of us seem to accept it as the natural order of things and question why we should ever strive for something better.

Re:What about osdev?

[Rick17JJ]

My favorite old keyboard was made back in the mid-1990's and has an old "AT" style connector. To connect it to a slightly more modern PS/2 style connector, I had to use a adapter. I use yet another adapter to connect that adapter to a USB port on a computer which lacks a PS/2 connector. I also have a KVM switch in the middle too, so that I can control both computers with just the one keyboard, monitor and mouse. Only one of the two computers lacks the PS/2 connector and needs the second adapter.

The old keyboard with the "AT" style connector requires only a very light touch, clicks nicely, and feels just right when typing. It also uses a split spacebar to place an extra backspace key at a more convenient, but non-standard location. I like it so well, that I bought several spare keyboards, just before they stopped making them, so that I could keep using them for the rest of my life at both home and work. With adapters connected to other adapters, I should be able to keep using the old NMB model RTB255CW+ keyboards for decades.

Recently, a couple of the keys stopped working as reliably on one of the keyboards. To solve the emergency, I snapped off the plastic cover on each key and used a brush to remove the years of accumulated hair, lint and small bits of shredded wheat from under each key. I then washed years of grime off of each plastic cover and then snapped them back on. Free of the hair and lint, the keyboard is now working perfectly and looks like new. I heard about doing that from a woman who's job is to clean keyboards, computer screens and printers at a local VA hospital. I bet we all have millions of dust mites living our keyboards.

• AT to PS/2 keyboard adapter
• USB to PS/2 Converter

Re:What about osdev?

[jonwil]

The #1 reason I want something like EFI is to eliminate the world of proprietary bootloaders/selection mechanisms for good. Essentially the BIOS would be the one that displays the list of boot options.

Unfortunatly no vendor that supports EFI (including all Linux distros I have seen) gets it totally right (where any boot time configuration options are handled through EFI and not through another bootloader)

Re:What about osdev?

[jrminter]

I'm not so happy to see companies like Dell supply systems without connectors for PS/2 mice and keyboards. I've had 'issues' with USB mice and keyboards on more than one system running Linux. What you call 'legacy,' I call an 'old standard that just works.' Kinda like me :)

Re:What about osdev?

[imroy]

Why would you change though? Bioses are only used for booting these days

Really now? Ever heard of a thing called ACPI? If you have a laptop and have used the hibernation mode, you're executing code that is more or less in the BIOS. There's also lots of other power management, hot swapping and thermal management code in the BIOS.

And lets not forget that booting is still an important role in itself. Not only is there hardware initialisation, but there's the important role of loading the OS and/or boot loader. In fact, the reason that boot loaders exist (e.g NT boot loader, LILO, GRUB) is because the PC BIOS (interface) is so simple and unable to do anything more than load the first sector from a device and jump into it. Booting from the network or other unusual devices has always been a little difficult. OpenBoot and now EFI makes this stuff easy because it's based on an extensible framework instead of hacks and workarounds for the backward-compatible legacy from an ancient platform (the original IBM PC, over a quarter of a century ago).

Re:What about osdev?

[TheRaven64]

For a small OS project, I'd recommend using Xen, rather than real hardware, as the target platform. The Xen block device driver front end can be implemented in a couple of hundred lines of C, and that gives you the ability to access any block device supported by the OS running in domain 0. Xen is close enough to real hardware to make writing for it a good learning experience (you still need to do all the page table management, etc), but it abstracts devices nicely so you don't have to do the boring work of supporting loads of different hardware.

Re:What about osdev?

[plague3106]

Because users will always need a keyboard, so you're not gaining another port anyway?

Re:What about osdev?

[Anonymous Coward]

... to remove the years of accumulated hair, lint and small bits ...

pubes.

Re:What about osdev?

[Hal_Porter]

Really now? Ever heard of a thing called ACPI? If you have a laptop and have used the hibernation mode, you're executing code that is more or less in the BIOS.

That's true of APM - the OS actually made Bios calls and the Bios responded to events like pressing the suspend button directly. Since the Bios is real mode and non reentrant that was an issue. But it's not true of ACPI - the bios has methods in AML byte code but the OS is responsible for executing them via an interpreter. And the reason it uses byte code rather than native code is because it was designed to work on both x86 and Itanium. So EFI uses ACPI too for power management. Of course byte code in a virtual machine is hopefully a bit safer too.

And lets not forget that booting is still an important role in itself. Not only is there hardware initialisation, but there's the important role of loading the OS and/or boot loader. In fact, the reason that boot loaders exist (e.g NT boot loader, LILO, GRUB) is because the PC BIOS (interface) is so simple and unable to do anything more than load the first sector from a device and jump into it.

Which is an excellent place to stop. Trying to do more like ACPI or ARC firmware which it evolved from means you need to have filesystem drivers and network stacks in ROM. And magic system partitions which you need to start the machine and are mean a reinstall of everything if they get corrupted.

Booting from the network or other unusual devices has always been a little difficult. OpenBoot and now EFI makes this stuff easy because it's based on an extensible framework instead of hacks and workarounds for the backward-compatible legacy from an ancient platform (the original IBM PC, over a quarter of a century ago).

You can boot off the network with a normal Bios. Or anything else - you just need an option Rom which implements int 19h. Or the Bios itself could support network booting. And just because you don't understand it, don't assume it's a mass of hacks and workarounds.

Re:What about osdev?

[Xiph1980]

By jonwil (467024)

The #1 reason I want something like EFI is to eliminate the world of proprietary bootloaders/selection mechanisms for good. Essentially the BIOS would be the one that displays the list of boot options.

Unfortunatly no vendor that supports EFI (including all Linux distros I have seen) gets it totally right (where any boot time configuration options are handled through EFI and not through another bootloader)
Well, EFI may not be the best way to get away from proprietary stuff. It seems that EFI explicitly vacilitates such behaviour by hardware manufacturers:

Interview with Ronald G. Minnich (Google cache)

What are your thoughts on the Extensible Firmware Interface (EFI)?

I have spoken with the EFI authors at length. They make no secret of the fact that a "core value" of EFI is the preservation of intellectual property related to chipset programming and internal architecture. To put it another way, EFI is dedicated to the preservation of "Hard" hardware (as defined above), and the provision of binary interfaces and subsystems to BIOS vendors and others.
It is not really possible to build a full open-source BIOS if EFI is involved. The Tiano system, which Intel claims is an open source BIOS, can not be used to build a BIOS unless it is attached to proprietary, binary-only BIOS code provided by a vendor.

Another important thing to realize about EFI is that it also contemplates enabling chipset features that will trap certain OS operations to an EFI-based control system running in System Management Mode. In other words, under EFI, there is no guarantee that the OS owns the platform.
Accesses to IDE I/O addresses, or certain memory addresses, can be trapped to EFI code and potentially examined and modified or aborted. Many see this as an effort to build a "DRM BIOS".
I am not sure what the real intent of this design is, but is is a real concern in secure environments (such as those found in governments, banks, and large search engine companies). A number of vendors and users have told me that they are not sure they can ship an EFI system they are willing to trust in a secure environment.

Re:What about osdev?

[shaitand]

'The ghastly PC partitioning system and the horrible kludges that we have to perform to get our PCs to boot are a weight around our necks. But things have been this way for so long that some of us seem to accept it as the natural order of things and question why we should ever strive for something better.'

Great but moving to SATA is going to leave us with the same boot and partition schemes.

Re:What about osdev?

[Richy_T]

Your ideas are intriguing to me and I wish to subscribe to your newsletter

No, seriously.

I was recently asked about learning programming options. I came up with a few ideas to suggest (this has been asked on Slashdot before also) but they all seemed to require a degree of preknowledge or setup that was over complex for a complete beginner. I couldn't help but think back to my 8-bit micro days: Plug it in, switch it on and there's a BASIC computer ready to program.

One of these with a BASIC interpreter (or other language if you really prefer), a PS/2 port, the ability to save/load programs to CF and some built-in graphics and sound routines would be nice to mess around with for the learner.

Rich

Re:What about osdev?

[Anonymous Coward]

Apparently you missed the stated goal of EFI to "protect hardware vendors' intellectual property." I don't know about you, but every time I've heard the words "protect" and "intellectual property" in the same sentence it was never something good for the FOSS community.

Re:What about osdev?

[PalmKiller]

If your using bios calls to access it, then yes it will be compatible if you set the bios to PATA emulation on the SATA ports. If your using your own access routines, probably you will have to support sata directly.

Re:What about osdev?

[cortana]

I think that Moving to SATA is orthogonal to adopting EFI, Open Firmware, Multiboot, or another scheme to bring the PC architecture out of the 80s. :)

Re:What about osdev?

[dfghjk]

SATA was specifically developed to offer full backward compatibility with existing software so this is a non-issue. Your post indicates you don't know nearly enough to be concerning yourself with this anyway. By the time you've written this, if you ever do, you will have learned enough to realize that you didn't need to ask this question.

A few points: You can choose to use PIO, but the BIOS will program which mode is used. ATA did not come from the IBM AT, it came much later. PIO mode 0 does not offer "best compatibility", the BIOS will ensure what modes work and will have them set up before you even run.

Re:What about osdev?

[jZnat]

Isn't EFI the software that enables treacherous computing? Why would we want to ditch BIOS (which can be replaced by OpenBIOS/LinuxBIOS/whatever it's called) in favour of a DRM-ladden piece of software?

Re:What about osdev?

[mrsteveman1]

Moving from MBR to GPT is another good reason, something i currently only see with EFI.

Re:What about osdev?

[Hal_Porter]

Since the Bios only knows how to read the first sector, it has no problem with moving from MBR to GPT. GPT disks can have a protective MBR that allows them to boot with a Bios.

Of course, that means that all x86 OSs would need to support GPT, and Windows doesn't.

But it can be done.

http://www.patentstorm.us/patents/6978363-claims.h tml

I think you can do it in an easier way than this patent incidentally.

If you wanted, you could roll out Windows Vista++ with support for GPT and all the other OSs would probably get dragged along.

Re:What about osdev?

[Hal_Porter]

> Of course, that means that all x86 OSs would need to support GPT, and Windows doesn't.

Actually, Windows server 2003 32 bit and Windows XP x64 both boot using the Bios and they support GPT for data volume, just not for boot ones.

http://www.microsoft.com/whdc/device/storage/GPT_F AQ.mspx

I'm sure you could put some code in the legacy MBR which the Bios could execute and have that code read the boot sector from a GPT partition though - it seems like something you could knock up in a few days. You'd need to make the boot time parts of Windows like OSLOADER support GPT when booting from a Bios too which they presumably don't at the moment. But if it can use GPT once it's running that's most of the problem solved. It would also let you install and use Windows on an Intel Mac on the same drive as MacOS.

In fact I don't really see why they didn't do this. It would mean that you could use GPT with a Bios machine and thus boot off drives bigger than 2TB.

Actually if all you want to do is to support big disks there's an even easier hack. Just define 0xFFFFFFFF in the partition length field in the MBR as "0xFFFFFFFF or more sectors". This is sort of the case with the protective MBR for GPT now - if the disk is bigger than 2TB, the protective partition has a length set to 0xFFFFFFFF. The difference is that in this case there is no GPT partition table containing the info - when the OS boots, it sizes the partition based on what the device returns. That would let you partition freely inside the the 2TB limit and have the last partition extend past it. Which actually covers most of the use cases for huge disks - e.g. one partion bigger than 2TB, or a boot partition smaller 2TB and a data partition bigger. The only one that is not covered is to have more than one partition bigger than 2TB.

but the motherboards!

[Doppler00]

Poor motherboard manufactures still have to support all the existing legacy devices, even though new devices uses new I/O standards. I always find it amusing to see serial, parallel ports, and floppy connectors on new motherboards. Of course, until DVD drive manufacturers switch to SATA, we'll still see IDE connectors on mothboards. Do the SATA controllers really cost that much more?

Re:but the motherboards!

[Joe The Dragon]

The floppy and ps2 ports are unlikely to die any time soon.

Re:but the motherboards!

[EvanED]

Floppy drives are still almost essential if you want to install Windows XP or earlier on a computer with a RAID or other controller card.

It's an unfortunate truth.

Re:but the motherboards!

[mmxsaro]

There are already DVD/DVD-RW units out there that are SATA-based. I know for a fact that Dell has been shipping all their computers without IDE connectors on motherboards for the past 6 months (floppy drive excluded). It's about time.

Re:but the motherboards!

[CastrTroy]

I remember about a year back reading about state of the art motherboards that got rid of all this crap we don't need. I seriously think that more manufacturers should do this. I have no use for a serial, parallel, ps2, floppy connectors, IDE connectors, and all the other legacy junk they insist on putting on motherboards. Every one of those ports takes away 1 (or several in the case of parallel/ide) ports that could be something useful, such as USB, FireWire, SATA, or something that people will actually use. If people want to hook up ancient hardware, let them use PCI adapter cards and port replecators.

Re:but the motherboards!

[mmxsaro]

This is true, yes, but you can always slipstream your controller drivers into a Windows XP CD without much trouble (that is, if you have another computer nearby to perform such a task) to completely bypass the use of a floppy.

Re:but the motherboards!

[EvanED]

This CAN take some effort though. I recently did this, slipstreaming (1) my SATA drivers, (2) Service Pack 2, and (3) all the hotfixes since SP2 into my XP CD, and I burned two or three coasters before getting it right. For instance, the first time I also tried to set up a semi-automatic install; but turns out this doesn't interact well with slipstreaming storage drivers like that. I forget what I screwed up after that.

All-in-all it took rather longer than it would have to just do it normally, and I coastered CDs in the process.

Re:but the motherboards!

[karnal]

Serial ports are useful. Not so much in the home, but they're still useful.

Of course, a little USB-Serial dongle solved that issue for me when I had a thinkpad t42 at work a while ago...

Re:but the motherboards!

[Andrew_T366]

I don't know about you, but I'd MUCH rather have parallel, serial, PS/2, and IDE connectors--which are backwards-compatible with most everything and do what they are meant to do well--than a half-dozen more USB or FireWire ports that don't even correspond to any devices that I personally use.

USB keyboards require special drivers and offer no interface-speed advantages unless you type at superhuman speeds.

Re:but the motherboards!

[Anonymous Coward]

I remember about a year back reading about state of the art motherboards that got rid of all this crap we don't need. I seriously think that more manufacturers should do this. I have no use for a serial, parallel, ps2, floppy connectors, IDE connectors, and all the other legacy junk they insist on putting on motherboards.

Many of us do have a need for all that "legacy junk". There is an enormous installed base of products, especially in the scientific/technical/medical field, that use those legacy interfaces.

At home, I have a 10-year old HP laser printer (it's from the era when HP made solid, rugged printers). It works great, and has parallel & serial interface. Does a parallel port on your new PC somehow offend you? The lack of a parallel port definitely offends me.

At my office there is a very big plotter used for printing very large technical drawings. It uses a serial port (only).

Every one of those ports takes away 1 (or several in the case of parallel/ide) ports that could be something useful, such as USB, FireWire, SATA, or something that people will actually use. If people want to hook up ancient hardware, let them use PCI adapter cards and port replecators.

Did you know that even PCI slots are becoming rare? The phone system at my office uses a plain regular 5V, 32-bit, 33 MHz PCI interface card for computer control. It is difficult to find rackmount servers from major vendors that still have these slots. Everything is PCI-X or PCIe.

Re:but the motherboards!

[level_headed_midwest]

Actually, it's the PATA devices that do. SATA has been built into Intel chipsets since the 865/875, NVIDIA chipsets since the NF3, and ATi since the 200M. So it's simply putting down a few physical connectors. NVIDIA and ATi/AMD still support a PATA channel on their chispets, but Intel chipsets newer than the 975X don't. That means boards with the 965 and 30-series have to buy another IC and put it on the board to get the functionality. Ironically, parallel, serial, PS/2, and the other much older legacy stuff uses so little bandwidth that it goes off the LPC bus and you just need a connector like SATA. So you'll be more likely see a board that has parallel and serial but no PATA than one that has PATA because it's less expensive.

Re:but the motherboards!

[lpontiac]

USB keyboards require special drivers

Did you miss the Microsoft to Drop Windows 95 by Year End article back in 2001? :)

Re:but the motherboards!

[Anonymous Coward]

>remember about a year back reading about state of the art motherboards that got rid of all this crap we don't need.

I remember it very well. Compaq did this about 7 or 8 years ago on a certain line of machines (all of them with a chinese jigsaw puzzle box embossed with a huge "Q"). The BIOS keyboard driver contained a bug that would cause it to lock up after 1 minute of use in DOS. Imagine the joy of trying to repair the windows 98SE that was on that thing...

No thanks to removing the ports that work perfectly well, TYVM.

>Every one of those ports takes away 1 (or several in the case of parallel/ide) ports that could be something useful, such as USB, FireWire, SATA, or something that people will actually use.

If you're talking about ATX back panel space, that's true. I'd be happy for them to leave them on the board as STANDARDIZED headers (LOL at actually getting them to standardize them). Then I can just pop in a slot cover with them all on if I want to use them.

And, of course, apart from the obvious, here some modern uses of those legacy ports in both business and home:

  - RS232: Satellite card hacking
  - Parallel: Homebrew projects for the lazy
  - PS2: Duh.... :) Also good for a +5V power supply.
  - Floppy: Might not be popular, but when you download one of those dreaded old Dell support packs that absolutely HAS TO unpack itself to a floppy in DOS MODE, well, you'll be mighty glad of it
  - IDE Connectors: Duh again! :) Also, how about all those cheap DVD burners that they still sell?
  - (Bonus!) Turbo button: Useful as a cover open detect switch tester for old Dell/Compaq computers... :)

Re:but the motherboards!

[b1t r0t]

Actually, real parallel printer ports can do things that USB printer ports can't, and that's to be used as a generic bit-banger I/O interface. For instance, there's a lot of EPROM programmers out there that will only work with a standard ISA-style printer port; not even a PCI printer port card will work.

But as far as I'm concerned, ISA serial ports (and floppies, and PS/2 ports) can go screw themselves. The Mac has done quite well without them for years, and Keyspan makes some damn nice USB serial adapters.

Re:but the motherboards!

[El_Isma]

Serial and parallel ports are still used! They come in handy in electronics. They're easy to use and most programming languages support them.

Re:but the motherboards!

[Blkdeath]

The floppy and ps2 ports are unlikely to die any time soon.

I recently purchased a couple new Dell computers for my company and couldn't justify paying extra for a floppy drive or hunting the site for a model with PS/2 ports. Instead I got 6 USB2.0 ports.

ISA ports, serial/paralell ports, PS/2 ports, floppy drives, PATA; it's all old technology. Let it go already. Much like cars gave up on carburetors, houses gave up wood-based heating, etc. so must computers give up the antique technologies we cling to so dearly.

Re:but the motherboards!

[zeromemory]

Every one of those ports takes away 1 (or several in the case of parallel/ide) ports that could be something useful, such as USB, FireWire, SATA, or something that people will actually use. If people want to hook up ancient hardware, let them use PCI adapter cards and port replecators. Uh, not quite. Many of the new, high-speed, interfaces are provided by the southbridge, so the number of USB/FireWire/etc ports is entirely limited by what's provided by the manufacturer of the chipset.

Legacy ports have very little to do with that is provided by the southbridge. Most legacy interfaces are provided by a totally independent chip (Super I/O), and most motherboard manufacturers would rather keep that low-cost chip on the motherboard than alienate customers with legacy devices.

Re:but the motherboards!

[Anonymous Coward]

It's not a zero-sum game. Most newer boards come with legacy ports AND a host of USB ports, SATA, FireWire, etc. Mine for example has the usual 2 IDE ports, floppy, PS/2, serial, parallel, and modem, but it also has 2 SATA, 6 USB, and Fast Ethernet. It's not a fancy board either, just a mainstream design from Abit.

The advantage to being legacy junk is that it costs next to nothing for the mobo manufacturers to stick those things onto existing silicon. It's not a question of whether or not everyone needs them -- it's that *some* people do, and there's almost no reason not to put them in. The few cents on the dollar they would save is almost immediately offset by the potential for lost sales. That said, a lot of manufacturers do produce models that lack these features, especially the microATX boards that do have a space premium. Perhaps you should look into buying one of these.

Re:but the motherboards!

[complete loony]

SATA DVD drives are already being produced. It is already possible to build a machine with no IDE drives. But they're not very common yet.

Re:but the motherboards!

[corychristison]

I use a Belkin USB-Serial adapter at work nearly every week. In all honestly, I think it's actually gotten faster since we moved to the USB adapter, but maybe that's just me. ;-)
P.S. - I work for an Advertising firm in my city. We run a few big digital (LED) billboards. One of which is pretty old and requires a serial port. The others are Ethernet.

Re:but the motherboards!

[TooMuchToDo]

My old Thinkpad T40 (pre-Lenovo) had no on-board serial, but has on-board bluetooth. I found a cheap serial adapter with bluetooth, works like a champ. Something to keep in mind if you need to move from serial device to serial device often.

Re:but the motherboards!

[Enderandrew]

Did you know you can fry your entire motherboard by plugging in a PS/2 connection while your computer is powered on? As a long-time IT professional, sadly I've seen it all too often. With USB connectors, you don't have that problem.

And the back of computer is often crowded with all kinds of connectors. I'm happy to be rid of the PS/2 connectors because they were taking up unnecessary space.

Re:but the motherboards!

[Doppler00]

That doesn't make sense. The use of serial and parallel ports is dictated by the operating system, not the underlying programming language. And most embedded systems components are switching over to USB and Ethernet at a rapid rate. If you still need the serial port, USB adapters are wonderful. You can have more than 2 USB serial ports without problem.

Re:but the motherboards!

[fractoid]

It was this exact problem that kicked me over to Ubuntu a month or so back. I was sick of XP, and I wanted an operating system that I could just use, instead of tinkering around installing extra hardware (a floppy drive, I haven't built a system with one since 1998) and messing with script files, drivers, settings etc. just to get the damn thing to run...

Re:but the motherboards!

[bladesjester]

houses gave up wood-based heating

Really? Funny, I know of a number of houses with wood-based heating. They're a lot more common in places that regularly get ice storms or lose power for other reasons.

Re:but the motherboards!

[Anonymous Coward]

try and hit f8 to boot into single user mode on windows in ANY version with a usb keyboard.

Re:but the motherboards!

[PitaBred]

If I can control an industrial pump from a USB->Serial port dongle, your printer will work fine. And if it requires specific software, make sure to set it to replicate something in the range of port 1-4. And if you want a parallel port, get an expansion card. The 99% of us who don't have much legacy shit don't want you Luddites ruining progress for the rest of us.

Re:but the motherboards!

[TheThiefMaster]

Even my bios supports my usb keyboard.

Window XP supports my usb keyboard in all modes, including safe mode and even the recovery console.

Windows XP is 5 years old, and it wasn't the first edition of windows to fully support usb.

So stop talking crap.

Re:but the motherboards!

[dvice_null]

> houses gave up wood-based heating

Actually biofuels are currently the "new thing", and people are converting oil based heating into wood pellets.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wood_pellet

Re:but the motherboards!

[Pogdranaut]

For hardware hackers, the parallel port remains the easiest way to interface to the pc, so I'm in no hurry to see it go.

Re:but the motherboards!

[TheThiefMaster]

A lot of modern motherboards support plugging in a ps2 keyboard / mouse while they're on. It doesn't take a lot of circuitry.

And even older motherboards have short protection on the socket, or just plain disable it if there's nothing plugged in when the board is powered up.

Though this doesn't apply to ALL motherboards, and with cheaper ones (generally with a via or sys chipset) they can go boom when plugging a ps2 device in while they're on, even now.

Re:but the motherboards!

[Anonymous Coward]

but in communist Russia, the industrial pump controls you!

seriously, the usb dongles don't pass all the port data. CI/V stuff works wonky along with modems, GPS' and other "useless old garbage"

Re:but the motherboards!

[Niggle]

My experience of USB->Serial converters is that they're fine for light usage at up to 19200 baud. Run them any faster than that or using more than about 80% of the available bandwidth and they get very unstable. We've tried about 20 different brands/models here and they're all unstable. And yes, these are using the latest drivers from the manufacturer's websites.

The best of them blue-screens WinXP about once a day under heavy usage (say 75% capacity at 115200 baud). The machines running the same app using real serial ports run just fine.

Re:but the motherboards!

[Pogdranaut]

The 99% of us who don't have much legacy shit don't want you Luddites ruining progress for the rest of us. Getting rid of a simple and reliable way of interfacing to the computer is not progress, in my view.

Re:but the motherboards!

[JasterBobaMereel]

Yes, I've used these too , and they are very unreliable ....

Re:but the motherboards!

[PitaBred]

Wine + /dev/ttyUSBX ;)

this page has a great walkthrough of how to accomplish it. It's the USB->Serial drivers that suck, not the devices themselves. Use a properly stable and functioning OS and drivers, and you don't run into those issues nearly as often.

Re:but the motherboards!

[Anonymous Coward]

The problem is, that most serial dongles don't support break signals correctly. Which is annoying when you want to persuade a Sun to the Boot PROM, or indicate to a datalogger that you'd like it to wake up, and start talking to you. Setting it to the lowest speed then sending 0xFFs for a bit usually works, but it's far from elegant.

Re:but the motherboards!

[Anonymous Coward]

Brainboxes have some excellent PCI RS232 cards, that support upto 8 ports. I use them regularly for industrial systems with computers that don't feature serial ports. I too have has issues with high speed(!) USB to RS232 converters, but the Brainboxes card works fine.

Re:but the motherboards!

[pe1chl]

I don't know much about semi-automatic install, but we use a fully-automatic install from the network (PXE) using unattend.txt and it has an option to add custom directories with drivers to the default search path, and automatically install drivers.
These directories get copied to the harddisk and it also works when the devices are added later (like a scanner, camera etc).

But you are right, those things never work correctly first-time. It is easy to make a mistake, and the functionality provided isn't exactly intuitive or well designed.
(for example, when you make a DRIVERS directory and add several subdirectories with different drivers in them, you have to include all names in the search path. I.e. it won't search a tree starting from a specified location, it only searches the explicitly named directories for .inf files)

Re:but the motherboards!

[chemicaloli]

Only a couple of months ago a bought a multimeter which requires a serial port to function, so serial ports defiantly have purpose, ps/2 I think could be done away with most easily

Re:but the motherboards!

[jez9999]

Agree with you with 1 exception: serial port. I like to have 1 serial port on there. I have an old US Robotics dialup modem which is extremely useful on the occasions when either ADSL is b0rked, or I've just moved house and don't have broadband setup yet.

I know you can get USB modems, but they're invariably crap.

Re:but the motherboards!

[jimicus]

DVD/CDROM drives are readily available in SATA variants:

http://www.ebuyer.com/UK/cat/CD---DVD-Drives/subca t/DVD-RW-SATA-Drives

Re:but the motherboards!

[Lumpy]

Yet these new fangled motherboards still RESERVE THE IRQ FOR THOSE RESOURCES!

Dammit if you are going to take my legacy ports free the farking IRQ'S for use by other items!

They take the ports but the resources are still on the chipsets.

Re:but the motherboards!

[jabuzz]

Funny I have an Optiplex 320 on my desk right now, arrived yesterday from Dell brand new. Still has a PATA optical drive. Now the Optiplex 740/745 are all SATA on the otherhand.

Re:but the motherboards!

[TheRaven64]

Can you define cheap? I haven't found anything much under $100, which seems a lot considering the bluetooth chip costs around $5, and the UART around $1.

Re:but the motherboards!

[Cythrawl]

It doesnt take any effort at all if you use nLite http://www.nliteos.com/
If you cant do it using that then there is no hope for you.

Re:but the motherboards!

[Anonymous Coward]

I work for a DOT, and we have:
(a) Signs
(b) Cameras
(c) Detectors
(d) Controllers
(e) Network switches
(f) Video encoders
(g) Terminal servers ...etc.

Every single one has a completely different method and set of default addresses for communicating with it via Ethernet (when it has something other than serial), or you can pretty much connect to any of them with a 9-to-9 RS-232 cable (or a modified 485 cable) at 9600,N81. This is especially helpful since some of them can lock up on the network port, but the serial port is still working. And this is the *new* stuff.

The last time we bought laptops, we went everywhere trying to find one that still had a built-in serial port. Serial communications are still very much important in industrial applications.

Re:but the motherboards!

[FrankNputer]

Err...just because you have no use for it doesn't mean that's the case for everyone. We have a lot of brand-new hardware that uses serial ports for control interfacing. Adding in a converter only makes the system more complicated & less reliable.

I haven't exactly noticed a big real-estate problem with motherboards, either. I have newer boards that manages to squeeze in several USB, FireWire, and SATA ports, and even has room for digital audio ports, while still providing all the "old" ports too.

Re:but the motherboards!

[zlogic]

A lot of motherboards don't have their SATA drivers included in Windows XP, meaning you have to provide a floppy in order to install the OS. And serial is great for hacking since it's relatively simple, cheap and popular. For example I have a brand-new Gigabit Ethernet switch with a serial port to control it.

Re:but the motherboards!

[EvanED]

Yeah, unless you run into this problem

Re:but the motherboards!

[EvanED]

Oh yeah, I remember what happened in a little more detail now. At first I decided to not slipstream the SATA driver, but just SP2 + hotfixes and with semi-automatic installation (it fills out fields automatically but you still have to go through to accept them). The reason for this was because the driver is on floppy, and the computer I was doing this on didn't have a floppy drive, so I figured I'd just do the F6 thing at the start. The mix of unattended and floppy-drive loading was what caused the problem I linked to.

I still don't remember what the other problems were, but at one point I did wind up extracting then compressing the raw CAB files for some reason.

Re:but the motherboards!

[Anonymous Coward]

Hey, guess what? You are not everyone else! What a concept! Just because YOU have no use for an on board parallel port does not mean no one else does.

And don't start with that USB shit. Those things cannot be accessed the same ways the on board ones can.

Re:but the motherboards!

[Cythrawl]

Why am I getting the corrupted sys file on F6 floppy driver loading? That is the Windows bug (or a feature) when using Unattended in any way. So to solve that either don't use Unattended page, or delete i386\winnt.sif file (amd64\winnt.sif for 64bit). Or integrate that floppy driver with nLite driver integration page (recommended).

EH?
What problem exactly?
its TELLING you to intgrate the floppy F6 Drivers into the installation using nLite. Which I believe is what the origianl poster you replied to said in the first place. nLite makes it easier as you dont have to manunally edit the winnt.sif files and make the scripts.
If you integrate all your floppy text mode drivers with nlite you WONT get that problem as it states in the last sentance.

so how is that a problem? unless you make it a problem?

Re:but the motherboards!

[Anonymous Coward]

I've bought a compaq evo D500 SFF. It's a celeron 1300MHz with 256 MB of RAM, which is rather old, and, lo and behold, it does not carry any socket except video and USB. 6 of them.

Re:but the motherboards!

[Lisandro]

I have no use for a serial, parallel...

Both parallel and serial ports are extremely useful, if only because they're the two most basic, easy to implement ways to communicate with electronic equipment. The cost impact of adding a UART to a moterboard is negligible. A while ago the company i work for paid premium prices for new laptops with onboard serial adapters because nowadays is impossible to find a stock laptop with "vintage" connectors.

And no, USB adapters won't cut it - they're either no configurable in speed, parity and other comm options or totally unreliable.

Re:but the motherboards!

[ninevoltz]

I have a SATA DVD drive in my new box here at work and it's fucked for booting from Linux Live CDs. "Can't find CD drive" Someone ought to fix that sometime.

Re:but the motherboards!

[glindsey]

try and hit f8 to boot into single user mode on windows in ANY version with a usb keyboard.

Gee, I do this all the time. Funny how this "BIOS" thing handles standard USB human interface devices these days, and has for years...

Re:but the motherboards!

[Vellmont]

ISA ports, serial/paralell ports, PS/2 ports, floppy drives, PATA; it's all old technology. Let it go already

Old doesn't mean inferior, that's a new (and often incorrect) idea.

There's plenty of devices that require a serial port to plug into. Also, how are USB keyboards/mice better than the PS/2 versions? I've got a KVM switch that uses PS/2 ports, not USB, so I simply wouldn't buy a computer without it.

I don't have much use for PATA, a floppy drive, or a parallel port. For a server I wouldn't buy one without a floppy drive (BIOS flashing, driver disks).

Re:but the motherboards!

[Anonymous Coward]

Serial ports are still plenty useful on servers, too.

I use the serial console daily at work, and there's no suitable alternative.

I've noticed that the people who say serial ports need to go away are those who have no idea what they're talking about, and have never worked a single day in the computer industry.

Re:but the motherboards!

[CompMD]

"I have no use for a serial...connectors,...Every one of those ports takes away...ports that could be something useful, such as USB"

Frankly, who cares if you have no use for serial connectors? There are millions of people across the world that will go, "ah, a consumer."

You do realize that RS-232 is far more pervasive, easy to use, easy to troubleshoot, and easy to develop for than USB, right? There are _billions_ of devices that interface over serial ports. The speed of USB is really quite irrelevant as well; not every device you interface to a computer needs to transfer data from 11 to 400Mbps. There are myriad applications where 115.2Kbps is fantastic. There is far more to the PC/workstation/entry level server world than playing games, downloading pr0n, and storing leeched movies. Serial ports are used every day on modern hardware, and if you don't believe me, try setting up a brand new Sun SPARC-based server. One of the first instructions is along the lines of "connect a serial cable to the console port..."

Re:but the motherboards!

[drew]

I don't. I still use the parallel port.

Re:but the motherboards!

[Blkdeath]

Old doesn't mean inferior, that's a new (and often incorrect) idea.

However maintaining legacy technology adds unnecessary overhead and can lead to unstable products and is therefore bad.

There's plenty of devices that require a serial port to plug into. Also, how are USB keyboards/mice better than the PS/2 versions? I've got a KVM switch that uses PS/2 ports, not USB, so I simply wouldn't buy a computer without it.

So buy a new KVM switch?

I don't have much use for PATA, a floppy drive, or a parallel port. For a server I wouldn't buy one without a floppy drive (BIOS flashing, driver disks).

Use a bootable CD for flashing your BIOS and most driver disks nowadays come on floppy disks. For that matter, isn't it just that much more convenient to take 20 drivers and concatenate them all onto a single CD-R for each workstation?

Re:but the motherboards!

[Vellmont]

However maintaining legacy technology adds unnecessary overhead and can lead to unstable products and is therefore bad.

I think that statement is over-generalized, and has hidden implications. I don't see any evidence that motherboards that have a PS/2 port are less stable than ones that don't. "legacy" in this context simply means technology that's been replaced with different, but not necessarily any better technology. In this theoretical, why isn't it the new technology making the system unstable? Blame can work both ways.

Use a bootable CD for flashing your BIOS and most driver disks nowadays come on floppy disks.

Some do, some don't. If you're putting together a $15,000 server are you really going to skip the floppy option and save $15 on the risk that some component of your solution requires a floppy drive to flash the bios/recover the server/whatever?

So buy a new KVM switch?

Why? The old one works just fine. If you chase technology just because "it's newer", you'll just wind up wasting a lot of money for nothing. I look for advantages in new technology, and I see none for PS/2 keyboards and mice.

Re:but the motherboards!

[EvanED]

I misremembered slightly what went wrong my latest point was an attempt to clarify.

The problem wasn't with slipstreaming the SATA driver, but it was caused by other messing around with the setup routine in nLite, specifically turning on some unattended features.

All I was trying to say was that when you start messing around with the setup, it's easy to make things go wrong. Maybe not so much if you're just slipstreaming a couple things, but there are so many checkboxes in nLite that do useful stuff that it's very easy to produce something that won't actually work right for what you want.

Re:but the motherboards!

[Ravenscall]

Works fine for me, on an MSI KT333.

Re:but the motherboards!

[curlynoodle]

RS232 ports remain widely used in industrial environments. Yes, yes, I know, USB to RS(whatever) serial adapters. However, these are expensive compared to native ports on system boards and PCI add-ons.

Also, I have a problem with all SATA until the Windows setup can detect connected drives WITHOUT additional drivers. A utopian request, but there it is.

Re:but the motherboards!

[TooMuchToDo]

Since it's a business use, under $250-300 is cheap for us....

http://www.wcscnet.com/HdwBTRS232.htm

$160 for a pair (so it comes down to $80 per adapater).

Re:but the motherboards!

[mmxsaro]

My bad; I should have mentioned it was the Dimension series. On the same topic, the Optiplex also carries onboard parallel and serial ports.

Re:but the motherboards!

[stevo3232]

It was in Windows 95 OSR2.

See here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_95#Editions

Re:but the motherboards!

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, same problem here. My USB->serial converter blue screens when I'm just using a GPS at a 4800.

Re:but the motherboards!

[Blkdeath]

I think that statement is over-generalized, and has hidden implications. I don't see any evidence that motherboards that have a PS/2 port are less stable than ones that don't.

More code, more overhead.

"legacy" in this context simply means technology that's been replaced with different, but not necessarily any better technology.

See my comment earlier about fuel injection versus carburetors.

Why? The old one works just fine. If you chase technology just because "it's newer", you'll just wind up wasting a lot of money for nothing. I look for advantages in new technology, and I see none for PS/2 keyboards and mice.

Because you're clinging to legacy technology that's clearly being obsoleted? You said earlier that you would go out of your way to purchase a new computer that supports PS/2 ports. So you're going to compromise a several hundreds (or thousands) dollar purchase to accomodate a $30 peripheral and an old keyboard?

As to the advantages of USB keyboard/mouse over PS/2 equivalents; a common port for all peripherals rather than a distinct port for each type of connection. If you want to get pedantic, another advantage is the fact you can use a USB keyboard that functions as a hub and connect your digital camera, mouse, etc. right on your desktop. So there you have it. Two advantages. Now what are the advantages of the PC mentality of grasping on to legacy technology until it's a decade past its best-before date?

Re:but the motherboards!

[Vellmont]

See my comment earlier about fuel injection versus carburetors.

This is an analogy and means nothing.


Because you're clinging to legacy technology that's clearly being obsoleted?

So basically you're advocating the "chase the new technology because it's new" argument. I reject this out of hand.

So you're going to compromise a several hundreds (or thousands) dollar purchase to accomodate a $30 peripheral and an old keyboard?


A 4 port USB kvm switch is around $65, and may or may not work as advertised. Replacing the keyboard with a decent quality one would run about $30, the mouse another $10-$15. My KVM switch works perfectly right now. So please tell me the advantage of spending $105 on a USB keyboard/mouse solution? (other than chasing technology that's no better).

I'm not sure what you mean by "out of your way", but most motherboards of any quality have still have PS/2 ports on them.


a common port for all peripherals rather than a distinct port for each type of connection.

And what does this gain me, other than some kind of Adrian Monk like symmetry?

If you want to get pedantic, another advantage is the fact you can use a USB keyboard that functions as a hub and connect your digital camera, mouse, etc. right on your desktop.

I don't have a digital camera, and if I did I'd either connect it to the front panel of the computer, or read the media directly through a SD->USB interface instead of through the camera. The mouse cord stretches just fine with the PS/2 cable.

Now what are the advantages of the PC mentality of grasping on to legacy technology until it's a decade past its best-before date?

You seem to have a very strange attitude towards technology. Perhaps you don't know this, but it's actually a tool to accomplish a goal, not a race to pursue the "latest and greatest" just for the sake of pursuing it. USB is great for anything involving getting mass amounts of data out of or onto a computer, auto-configuration, etc. But it offers nothing for replacing a keyboard and mouse. Next you're going to be telling me that I need to get a mouse that supports USB 2.0 full speed because that USB 1.1 mouse is just old "legacy technology".

Re:but the motherboards!

[FauxReal]

For some lame reason I can't use my USB keyboard to get into or use the BIOS on my Intel 955XBK motherboard. I have to bust out the PS/2 keyboard for that stuff.

Re:but the motherboards!

[Trogre]

Just for the record I still use all those ports, and for very good reasons.

Some header

[Dunbal]

Seagate to Drop IDE Drives by Year End

      My first thought was: But won't they get damaged?

Too bad...

[DogDude]

That's too bad. Seagate makes some decent drives. I only hope that this doesn't apply to Maxtor, now that Seagate owns them. I looooove me some Maxtor drives.

Re:Too bad...

[mmxsaro]

I hope you're kidding about loving Maxtor drives. Just two days ago I got another dead Maxtor hard drive. Pretty much all the drives that were sold in the past 5 years have died. I have a whole stack of Maxtor 20/40 GB model hard drives at work from all the clients I service.

Re:Too bad...

[larry bagina]

Maybe they've improved, but I've seen Maxtors shit out too many times. (Only once for me; I learned my lesson. But I've seen plenty of other people get fucked over by them too). The last time slashdot did a "which drive manufacturer is the best?" story, a large number of people seemed to agree that Maxtor should be avoided like a 3rd bush presidential term.

Re:Too bad...

[therufus]

I love Maxtor drives too. They help me sell Seagates and WD's when they die. In the computer shop that I work in, every PC with a Maxtor drive that comes in for repair, a HDD test is run on the drive. It's truly frightening how many fail. They're not all old drives either, some are brand new. It's usually a 50/50 ratio of living to dead hard drives.

The other thing of note is the fact that it's always the same fault when they die. Windows will be able to see the physical drive but all the formatting on the drive gets toasted. It's almost like the FAT/NTFS table gets smashed every time. Uncanny really.

Re:Too bad...

[Enderandrew]

When I worked for HP, we bought Maxtor, Seagate, Hitachi and WD drives. However, easily 90% of our HDD failures were due to Maxtor drives. Of all the hardware we had from all the vendors, the Maxtor HDDs were the items we replaced the most in warranty. I'd never touch them with a ten-foot pole. I wouldn't use one if it were free. I hate losing data to HDD crashes.

I generally only buy Seagate or WD.

Re:Too bad...

[networkzombie]

I work in IT (medical industry). I had about 70 Maxtor drives in the field. They were mostly 40 and 80 drives, with a few 20s and 120s. 56 of them failed near the warranty. Some were covered and I used the replacements they sent. Now those are failing. I was replacing them with Seagate drives (including the 14 that still worked), but now that Seagate bought Maxtor I am switching to my favorite drives, Samsung. Samsung has the fewest failures I've ever seen (2 out of every 100), even back to my 4.3 Giggers. Whenever someone tells me they like Maxtor drives, I truly believe that they only own one or two. I will never trust any Maxtor drive. Good luck.

Re:Too bad...

[TheThiefMaster]

I've owned 10 maxtor drives in recent years, and I'm using 7 right now. It was only certain models of maxtor drives that failed, the 40-120GB (diamondmax 9?) versions. The 20, 160, 250 and 4x300GB disks I have are all working perfectly, and have been for at least a couple of years (even longer for the 20GB one).

I wonder what they did to cause so many failures of one series of drives?

Re:Too bad...

[Anonymous Coward]

.....you realize they're only dropping IDE based drives? You know, the drives that used to store your abbacus information way back in the day - they're gonna stop making them, too many people have calculators now.

Re:Too bad...

[Sexy Bern]

I do a lot of work with small businesses and domestic users.

Every single drive I've replaced in the last 12 months has been a Maxtor.

They have all been series 9, all in the 40-120 GB range.

In the same period I have not replaced drives by any other manufacturer.

Re:Too bad...

[Corporate Troll]

The 20, 160, 250 and 4x300GB disks I have are all working perfectly

I bought two 160Gig Maxtor drives, one for my machine, one for my parents machine. My parents disk failed after 3 months but it's a heavily used machine, mine failed just after warranty, but the machine was rarely used and turned off most of the time. I also have a 80Gig Maxtor drive that behaves very funkily.

The replacement drive they sent for the "failed after three months", failed a few months ago, while the warranty had just been expired. I have sworn myself never to buy Maxtor again....

Re:Too bad...

[tomstdenis]

Seagates and Samsung are both good choices. Little tip though, if you got the space and the cash, raid-1 your data drives, that way you're less likely to actually lose anything when one dies.

Loves me my 2x500GB raid-1 :-)

Tom

Re:Too bad...

[TheThiefMaster]

Admittedly the 160 I have is a low-end series 10 not a series 9, so it might not be affected by whatever causes the failures.

Though you can't buy maxtors any more anyway, they've been bought by seagate and the brand is being used only for the usb external drives (which have a very good reputation).

Re:Too bad...

[Corporate Troll]

I thought it was the other way around: Seagate that bought Maxtor. I've still seen Maxtor brand disks (SATA) in my local supermarket.

The best disk I have is a (over?) 10 year old 18Gig IBM SCSI drive, but those are not in the same league (and price range) as SATA or PATA disks are.

Re:Too bad...

[TheThiefMaster]

I said "bought by Seagate", not "bought Seagate".

Although, you're right that Maxtor drives are still available, but they're not getting any larger than 320GB, even though everyone else has 500GB, 750GB or even 1TB drives out already. Maxtor DID have a 400GB (and maybe a 500GB) drive before they were bought, but now they've only got a 320GB model as their largest. This is also suspicious, because it was Seagate that used to have a 320GB model, Maxtor's was only 300GB.

Maxtor itself is nothing but a brand now.

Re:Too bad...

[AngelWind]

I also work in the IT industry, more specifically desktop support, which means I get to replace a computer when the hard drive dies out.

I believe that Maxtor sells their bottom-of-the-line hard drives that barely pass testing to places like HP for cheap computers. My theory for this is that I have nine Maxtor drives at home, and they're at least three years old (PATA and SATA), and I haven't had any kind of failure to them.

On the other hand, the HP computers we have here have had a lot of Maxtors die within three years. They're the 40GB Diamondmax 9 series, which I believe was only one platter since it's so thin (and looks as cheap).

Maxtor retail seem to be the better of the bunch, but stay away from their OEM stuff if you come across it (usually identified by a "Replace with HP Spare" sticker). At least I don't mind Seagate drives. I have two 80GB drives in a mirror for my /home and /var dirs.

Re:Too bad...

[Corporate Troll]

Sorry... Misread that...

MOD PARENT UP LAME PUN

[Anonymous Coward]

*ba-doom* *crash*

kthx

buy a

[ArchieBunker]

fucking $20 SATA card

Re:buy a

[Anonymous Coward]

If you can find a way to install a SATA card in an Alesis HD24 or Fostex D160, you're a smarter man than I. A converter might work, but given how sensitive the MR-8 is to compactflash cards, I wouldn't bank on it.

It's sour.

[Anonymous Coward]

The tech industry as a whole deprecates and wastes so much. It is a wasteful nightmare.

Re:It's sour.

[Jeff DeMaagd]

PATA has been around for such a long time though, and we got about a four hear transition time. I certainly wasn't the quickest to adopt it, I'm glad it wasn't forced on the market within a year like the AGP to PCIe seemed to be. Sure, you could get AGP cards but the standard was relegated to second class treatment almost immediately.

While I don't think I do anything that saturates a PATA connection, I like the fact that SATA drives can just be plugged into a backplane without fancy adapter circuitry, proprietery connectors or any cables at all, all that simply can't be done with PATA. External SATA has greatly improved the performance of external drives because it's a native signal end-to-end, I'm not stuck with having to use USB or Firewire.

Re:It's sour.

[garett_spencley]

I'm glad it wasn't forced on the market within a year like the AGP to PCIe seemed to be. Sure, you could get AGP cards but the standard was relegated to second class treatment almost immediately.

Indeed. I was one of the poor unfortunate clods who went and upgraded his video card during the transition from AGP to PCI-e. I could have gotten a PCI-e version of my card but I only wanted to upgrade my video card, not my mother board etc. so I went AGP. I guess by now (about 2 years later) I got some good use out of it. But I'm the type of guy who likes to upgrade one component at a time as priority demands. Problem now is, in the last 2 - 3 years so many standards have changed so quickly. Much faster than I remember them changing (though that could just be due to aging). My current PC is pretty ok for my needs. But I'm starting to feel obsolete. It's single-core. 2Ghz. 1GB Ram. AGP card. IDE drives. When I upgrade I'm going to have to ditch this PC entirely and go BTX, dual or quad core, SATA, PCI-e etc. It will be an investment of a grand or two when I'm used to just investing a hundred or two here or there to upgrade what needs it.

I strongly believe that the main reason so many people are stuck with ancient old PCs from the mid - late 90's is price above anything else. Yes computer prices have come down dramatically. You can buy a PC for a couple hundred now. But a lot of people have WAY more important things to spend a couple hundred on. Like bills and food etc. And if their PCs fulfill their basic requirements then there's no reason to go brand spanking new. Right now we seem to be at a point where it's brand new or nothing. Simply because so many standards have been ditched for new ones in such a short period of time (ATX to BTX, 32-bit to 64-bit, single core to multi, IDE to SATA, DDR to DDR2 just off the top of my head).

Even if most of the standards have existed for some time, it's the manufacturers who, all of a sudden, decided to force the new ones all at once. That's how it feels from a budget conscious consumer.

Re:It's sour.

[TheThiefMaster]

Don't be stupid. Nearly no motherboards are BTX (in fact I'd forgotten about it), nearly no-one uses the 64-bit abilities of 64-bit cpus, nearly no-one properly uses more than one core (most games only use one, and those are the only intensive tasks most people run), and IDE isn't dead just yet.

But still, you're right that you will need to completely replace your pc to upgrade though, and while quite annoying, it's not the end of the world. You can still choose not to upgrade, and all you'll miss out on is the "high detail" setting in new games. If you'd prefer, you could buy a games console for playing games on, (the xbox 360 gets most of the games), and keep your pc for playing the games you already have and surfing slashdot. Though you'd slowly pay that way, because console games are more expensive than pc games.

Re:It's sour.

[AbRASiON]

You don't need BTX, it's pretty much a complete failure, ATX is fine - but yeah the rest needs to go :(

Re:It's sour.

[Dragonslicer]

I just spent about $800 a few months ago overhauling my system. New motherboard, AMD dual core CPU, 2 GB of memory, GeForce 7900 video, case, power supply, and an SATA DVD burner (only about $35, and it has LightScribe, which is pretty neat). The only thing inside my computer that wasn't new was my hard drive.

Re:It's sour.

[Aleksej]

Think of the Molex connectors!

Not sure if SATA power connectors are sturdy enough, though...

Re:It's sour.

[Nimey]

As others have said, don't bother with BTX. Go with some form of ATX, or DTX since it's case-compatible with ATX designs.

I feel your pain, though. I was on Socket A for four years and finally just had to buy new everything except case and power supply (and peripherals), and the latter I had to get a 20-24 pin adapter for.

Re:It's sour.

[garett_spencley]

But still, you're right that you will need to completely replace your pc to upgrade though, and while quite annoying, it's not the end of the world.

That was my only point. The fact that I got the ATX vs. BTX situation wrong implies ignorance, not stupidity.

As for the rest, the last time I went in to a local shop to get the absolute lowest end bare-bones hardware that I could to put a cheap PC together for my wife they were no longer selling 32-bit CPUs. I can't stick SDRAM on a new motherboard. I'll have to ditch my perfectly good AGP card for a PCI-e that I don't need just to upgrade my CPU and RAM.

You put a lot of emphasis on games but there are more uses for newer hardware than just games. My current PC is feeling sluggish with the applications that I need. For my business I do a lot of video encoding and image processing etc. Of course that justifies upgrading and you're right, it's not the end of the world. But it means spending a lot more on newer hardware that I don't need just to get the few upgrades that I do. That was the only point I was trying to make.

Re:It's sour.

[Kjella]

Problem now is, in the last 2 - 3 years so many standards have changed so quickly. Much faster than I remember them changing (though that could just be due to aging).

I think that's just rosy glasses.... I remember many a time when there was new sockets, new RAM, new to support bigger disks, new USB connectors, new this and that... I think interfaces have become more stable, at least USB equipment which now replaces keyboard, mouse, printer and supports almost every new gadget like digicams etc., of course they still come out with new sockets and RAM types and such but that's just to be expected. There's always something on the horizon, like eSATA (now), DDR3 (2008?) PCI-e 2.0 (2008?), whatever new sockets arrive and so on but well... can't hold back progress.

Re:It's sour.

[berashith]

You are exactly correct. I used to buy a high end motherboard every few years that would accept most of my current components, and then upgrade these as needed. At one point I didn't upgrade for about 2 years, and I got so far behind that an entire system swap is needed. This led me to just bring everything to the top of what that MoBo can hold, and just hope that I can keep playing some games.

Most of my computing use at home now has very low requirements, so I now use a nokia n770 for the majority of my needs, and boot the tower only when I have a storage or performance need.

Re:It's sour.

[TheThiefMaster]

I put a lot of emphasis on games because that's what a "home" pc tends to get used for.

Of course if you aren't a typical home user or you are a business doing other intensive things, then it's different.

If you're doing video encoding (and want it to be quick) then you could do with as powerful a cpu, and as fast ram and hard-disk as you can get (with a minimal graphics card). I'd recommend a dual or quad core (depending on budget) with plenty of DDR2 memory, in a motherboard with an onboard gfx chip.

With your complaint about not being able to put SDRAM in a modern motherboard, that's because SDRAM is old and the motherboard is new, simple as that. Technology has changed. You couldn't put simms in a motherboard that took dimms when that changeover happened either. You can't put older AGP cards in a modern (ok, not quite so modern any more) AGP slot because the voltage changed. Several times in fact.

Oh, and a word of advice: Don't buy multi-socket boards (eg AGP and PCI-e), they're often horrifically slow, overpriced, incompatible and unstable.

Not all computers have a free slot

[tepples]

I mean, if you cant get an Parallel ATA Disk anymore, just get a SATA controller. So should I remove my TV input card, my NIC, or my sound card to make room? And will companies continue to make SATA controllers after most PCI slot product lines have been replaced with PCI-e or USB 2.0 equivalents? And how do I reinstall an operating system if the setup program doesn't recognize SATA?

Re:Not all computers have a free slot

[EvanED]

So should I remove my TV input card, my NIC, or my sound card to make room?

If you don't have a spare slot, yes, that's a problem.

And will companies continue to make SATA controllers after most PCI slot product lines have been replaced with PCI-e or USB 2.0 equivalents?

That's probably aways down the line. A quick survey shows PCI slots still outnumber PCI-e even on the highest-end mobos. (Though both seem to be in vanishingly small numbers.)

And how do I reinstall an operating system if the setup program doesn't recognize SATA?

If you're referring to Windows, that's what pressing F6 during the start of the textmode setup is for (I suspect you still have a floppy connected, though I could easily be wrong), or you can use nLite to slipstream your SATA drivers. Both solutions will work. If you're talking Linux, it shouldn't be a big issue to get a later revision that supports it.

Look, it's going to be inconvenient if you don't have SATA ports on your motherboard. (As I said in a couple other posts, I'm in that boat too. Though I did have a spare PCI slot.) But you can't reasonably expect companies to support legacy technology forever. It does cost them money to support the two standards, and I doubt they'll lose many sales because of this.

Re:Not all computers have a free slot

[level_headed_midwest]

PCI slots are far from dead, although my year-and-a-half-old NF4 SLi 939 motherboard that cost me $110 has 5 PCIe slots (2 x16, 3 x1) and only two PCI slots. Boards don't have four or five slots like they used to back in the late '90s through about 2005, but most have at least a couple if they're not a uATX or ITX board. Even the little guys generally have one PCI slot. And don't forget FireWire or USB 2.0- you can attach disks via FireWire and disks, tuners, NICs, and such over USB, as long as you don't have a 5+-year-old machine with USB 1.1 ports.

By the way, only recently did anything PCIe x1 and any SATA optical drives less than a hundred clams start to show up. GPUs had been PCIe x16 for a while, but very little besides larger RAID cards had been PCIe except for GPUs. Even now most NICs and tuners are PCI. Now five years from now PCI might be rare, but it's like parallel and serial ports and laptop floppy drives today. Many computers lack them now, but there's not been much made in years that use them, let alone use *only* them. By the time 2012 gets here, I'm sure that the nice fanless machine will probably have been replaced with something that supports SATA and PCIe (probably 2.x of not 3.0.)

Re:Not all computers have a free slot

[VGPowerlord]

And how do I reinstall an operating system if the setup program doesn't recognize SATA?

If you're referring to Windows, that's what pressing F6 during the start of the textmode setup is for (I suspect you still have a floppy connected, though I could easily be wrong), or you can use nLite to slipstream your SATA drivers. Both solutions will work. If you're talking Linux, it shouldn't be a big issue to get a later revision that supports it.

Look, it's going to be inconvenient if you don't have SATA ports on your motherboard. (As I said in a couple other posts, I'm in that boat too. Though I did have a spare PCI slot.) But you can't reasonably expect companies to support legacy technology forever. It does cost them money to support the two standards, and I doubt they'll lose many sales because of this.

I have a Windows XP SP2 disc, and it recognized my SATA controller and drive without any problems.

Re:Not all computers have a free slot

[EvanED]

Whether it does or not depends on how your SATA controller presents itself. Does your motherboard have integrated SATA, or are you using an external controller?

Re:Not all computers have a free slot

[Short Circuit]

Well, for $950, you could get a PCI bus expander. I have to wonder if there are other smaller, cheaper models out there. But being connected at 24Kb/s, I'm not inclined to look any further.

Re:Not all computers have a free slot

[VGPowerlord]

Integrated SATA.

Re:Not all computers have a free slot

[Crunchie Frog]

You best check that your BIOS isn't set to use IDE compatibility mode for talking to the SATA drives. I know my new ASUS M2A-VM HDMI board was set to use IDE compatibility mode as factory default.

Windows install will recognize them when they are set to IDE compatibility, but you wont get any of the benefits of SATA - the speed and NCQ. If you set the BIOS to not use the SATA compatibility mode then I don't think Windows install will recognize them, SP2 or not.

Well they were my experiences anyway. I ended up having to slipstream the SATA drivers in using nlite as a previous poster mentioned. Its very easy if you need to do it.

My bigger problem is that the Ghost book disk doesn't support SATA either, so i can backup but not restore. There seem to be some solutions for building custom bootable ghost disks but I haven't got around to that yet.

Re:Not all computers have a free slot

[VGPowerlord]

I haven't yet checked my BIOS settings, but in the Device Manager, it appears as connected to the NVIDIA nForce3 250 Serial ATA Controller (v2.6) with Serial ATA DMA as the transfer type, although the dropdown is greyed out because Let BIOS select transfer mode is checked. (I installed my motherboard drivers afterwards, plus the board's nForce3 chipset isn't exactly new.)

Re:Not all computers have a free slot

[wonkavader]

> So should I remove my TV input card, my NIC, or my sound card to make room?
> ... And how do I reinstall an operating system if the setup program doesn't
> recognize SATA?

No, you should buy a new motherboard, one with a crappy implementation of NIC and sound right there on it, with a faster, cooler processor than you currently have. Your OS comment makes me assume you're running windows. You should already be good at reinstalling that.

OR

Buy an $18 adapter that lets you attach a SATA drive to your existing IDE controller:
            http://www.satacables.com/html/sata_to_ide_adapter .html

Re:Not all computers have a free slot

[BrianGKUAC]

I think it's kinda funny that it doesn't seem odd to you to suggest that we should fix a problem regarding the discontinuation of a 5 year old HDD interface through the use of 30 year old technology...

Eh

[Jethro]

That's ok, I can still get my Western Digital drives.

Re:Eh

[bladesjester]

I hadn't bought a WD drive in years because I had some trouble with a few where I used to work (we got a really bad batch). However, a couple of months ago, I decided that my laptop's drive (40GB split 30/10 between windows and linux) was too small for all of the things I want to use it for, so I got one of WD's 320GB external drives.

I have to say that I'm impressed. It's pretty quiet, has adequate air flow, and more than responsive enough for a storage drive.

It feels nice to have real drive space again as well. In fact, I've spent the last several weeks ripping my cd collection so I can listen to it at my desk without digging through discs.

Re:Eh

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, sure YOU can get other brand of disks, but how about r00t over here? How the heck is he supposed to be able to play WOW after Seagate ceases to sell IDE disks?

PATA won a ribbon cable

[leek]

Seagate SATA long time on this.

They're a bunch of SASies.

PC Joe won't understand SCSI isn't old enough.

ISA...

[gringer]

ISA slots were available long after most of us had ditched our old ISA peripherals. You Insensitive Clod! I still have an ISA modem. Works much better than those silly winmodems, too.

Re:ISA...

[ls671]

I still use an external US Robotics SupraFax Modem 14,400 baud to pop mail from accounts that do not allow internet access ;-) It uses a serial cable to connect to the server. All mails sent to me converge to a unique account. I then read my mail with Pine. I have all sorts of filters, rules and roles setup to handle all accounts centrally and transparently.

Note that I am not trying to proove any point beside the fact that some of us still use older technologies because they work well for us ;-)

Cheers,

Re:ISA...

[G-funk]

Mo... dem? What is this device you speak of? ;)

Re:ISA...

[Anonymous Coward]

I have an ISA SCSI card -- seriously!

Re:ISA...

[Aleksej]

I have both.

Though I've been using a PCI modem (that requires a special driver that won't work on 64-bit in case I switch to 64-bit after the next upgrade), and took it out, because all the two FTN links without broadband have got their systems misconfigured, so they called me out of time and with wrong passwords... :( Also, I think they've got broadband for half a year already, but neither of us bothered fixing the links.

As for the scanner, the system with ISA has 256Mb of RAM, and though the scanner is slow, I'd like to scan into high resolution (yeah, I also have an EPSON LQ-1050 printer - don't worry, I'm not printing graphics on it), which makes it even slower (and until I buy a (SATA, WD) new hard drive, that system will still use 4+1Gb storage). The only real issue is that I don't have the space to store the scanner near that machine without disconnecting it, though. :-)

Re:ISA...

[Reziac]

That's actually one of the reasons this here rock-solid old P3 has not been retired, nor is it likely to be any time soon.

You can still buy its Tyan 1830S motherboard new -- for about half again more than it cost back-when. Evidently there's still demand for something with ISA slots.

How nice for you.

[Anonymous Coward]

But those of us who use computers beyond the confines of gaming and parent's basement often use serial ports and parallel ports and all the other useless legacy junk you so 1337ly disdain.

Re:How nice for you.

[Anonymous Coward]

I second that.

Generally, I get sad with ever widening gap between users and technology. USB is "new" serial/parallel port but I cannot use and control it like I could do with legacy ports. I can't fiddle with it without buying expensive, underperforming "USB-to-whatever" bridge chips that obscures what is really going on on the wires. Like back then when PCI superseded ISA, "new, better" replacement is vendor locked, if you want to use it, make your devices that run over it, you need to buy yourself an ID from a regulating body.

Each new hardware "improvement" is more and more anti-hacker, more exclusive club, more "keep out!".

We are often discussing free software issues here on /. , but DRM, TrustedComputing and TiVoisation are in fact problems with closed, obscure hardware. Back in days of dawn of GNU, all you needed to control your electronic estate, beside software source, was to get or deduct the schematics of hardware. IMHO, that is why RMS concentrated on, at the time, only part that was obscure. Things changed immensely. We have almost all of our software needs covered with software we can control but we are still at mercy of hardware manufacturers.

We need to get back to basics, perhaps as far as pre - IBM PC era and reinvent our computers, making all the right, logical and natural decisions this time, the way they should have been from the start - simple, robust, flexible, extensible, transparent.

Re:How nice for you.

[boscosmith]

How is USB not a viable alternative? It's a fixed form port that can be upgraded in speed while maintaining backwards compatibility.

Re:How nice for you.

[jshriverWVU]

Serial ports are still useful if you're into EE. Anyone else have a serial PIC burner? Know even they are going USB now, but still a lot of homebrew electronics that use serial for computer -> project i/o

Re:How nice for you.

[mkendall]

How is USB not a viable alternative [to serial and parallel ports]? It's a fixed form port that can be upgraded in speed while maintaining backwards compatibility.

The USB frame structure imposes a minimum 1ms latency on any end-to-end transaction. Even though USB-serial adapters can support high baud rates, repeated query/response transactions will not go faster than the limit set by the latency. This is a real problem in some situations. For example, dongles for downloading firmware into microcontrollers can run significantly more slowly on a USB serial adapter than when plugged directly in to a real serial port.

What's next???

[NCTRNAL]

The next thing you know, I am going to be told that BetaMax, LaserDiscs, CRT's and Windows NT 4.0 are being phased out. (Huddles in the corner to sob away while playing on his Lite-Brite)

Re:What's next???

[jrwr00]

Hay! i still use a CRT, i think they are better for gaming :)

i love my 120hz refresh rate

Re:What's next???

[EvanED]

I still use a CRT too. I... am too cheap to spend $300 or more on a flat panel*, despite my current monitor approaching its last legs.

* After using 1600x1200 resolution for a few years, I ain't never going back. 1680 by whatever it is that widescreens sometimes are is about my limit in terms of how much smaller I'll accept. This basically means I need a 19", which start at ~$300. And if I got one anyway... I'd probably just put it next to this in a dual monitor setup.

Re:What's next???

[Enderandrew]

I generally only run 75-80 hz and I have a 2 ms response time. My eyes can't really distinguish anything beyond that. I went from a 19 CRT to a 19 widescreen LCD, and not only is the screen bigger, and I have more desk space, but the picture is just so much nicer.

As a gamer, I enjoy being able to properly appreciate the eye-candy the game provides.

Re:What's next???

[jrwr00]

i dont know why but at even 90hz i still see a flicker

Re:What's next???

[Enderandrew]

Video card issues? Poor drivers? Bad monitor? I'm not sure.

Re:What's next???

[PitaBred]

You can get a 20" 1680x1050 flatscreen from newegg for much closer to $200 than $300. My BenQ FP202W was only $220 I believe.

Re:What's next???

[muffen]

I used to as well for the longest time but then I both 2x19" LCD's, and I am never going back.

Re:What's next???

[Anonymous Coward]

I still use a CRT too. I can easily tell that LCDs have a lower gamut than CRTs, and it drives me up a wall. I also view my monitor from several odd angles that make LCDs extremely vexatious to use.

I will never stop using CRTs. I have an ancient 19" Dell CRT hooked up to my laptop. I love that thing, and there's no way I'm getting rid of it.

I will only buy an LCD if it has a touchscreen, and even then, I'd take a CRT touchscreen if it one was available.

I'm actually thinking of buying another CRT at a flea market next week (there's a huge computing flea market in my city every month, which is where I buy most of my hardware), and asking my boss if I can bring it to work to replace the LCD hooked up to my work desktop.

Re:What's next???

[Ravenscall]

I got a Samsung 225BW 22" for $279. You can get the 19-20" even cheaper, and I honestly cannot really tell the difference between it and my old Dell P1140 when it comes to gaming.

Uses for such a PC

[Cryacin]

1. Giant novelty paperweight
2. Boat Anchor
3. Museum Centerpiece
4. Messy room filler
5. Novelty hamster/bird coffin

Didn't you know that whatever you buy is obsolete within 30 seconds of buying it?

Re:Uses for such a PC

[Hal_Porter]

2. Boat Anchor

You mean BOAT ANCHOR!!!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cvXZVJXIyqM

I liked "jumping up and down LIKE A JACK RUSSELL FUCKING TERRIER" and "You IDIOT you own a MACINTOSH! The file is FUCKING GONE!" too.

Re:Uses for such a PC

[bladesjester]

I thought the same thing when I saw his post.

I love that video =]

There goes the cheap external storage ...

[Anonymous Coward]

I like using firewire for my external storage - it's what that interface was designed for, after all (and I have a Mac, so it's not like it's crippled by cruddy drivers). Guess what? All the cheap external cases with IEEE1394 support take PATA IDE drives only. No SATA. Most of the cases with SATA support provide SATA and USB2 ports only.

Sure, USB2 works, but damnit, every IEEE1394 case I have has two ports, for daisy chaining ... I'm yet to see that on a USB2 case. A quick check of the cheap vendors doesn't reveal anything; a search on Google finds one for the modest price of $AU190 (inclusive of tax). There may be other options in the US, but that's the US, not Australia (where I live).

So much for the cheap disk storage boost ... *sigh*

Re:There goes the cheap external storage ...

[HeroreV]

That's what eSATA (External SATA) is for. It's a much better solution than Firewire (besides the current low adoption).

Re:There goes the cheap external storage ...

[toddestan]

Sure, USB2 works, but damnit, every IEEE1394 case I have has two ports, for daisy chaining ... I'm yet to see that on a USB2 case.

That's because USB2 isn't built for that. It can be done, but it essentially means putting a USB2 hub in the drive enclosure, then internally wiring the USB harddrive to to the USB hub. It adds to the cost, which is likely why enclosures like that are rare.

Re:There goes the cheap external storage ...

[dadragon]

Here is one. I have an older version that only has FW800 and FW400 on it.

Seems it has two firewire 800 ports, one firewire 800, one USB2 and one eSATA. It is bloody expensive, though.

When will old PCI die?

[Michael Woodhams]

My motherboard has great big old PCI slots, and tiny little 1xPCI-e slots which are just as capable. PCI-e has taken over for graphics cards, but I've never even seen a 1xPCI-e expansion card. (The motherboard manufacturers don't believe they'll be used either - they put them next to the 16x slot where double-width graphics cards will make them inaccessable.)

When will old PCI die? Perhaps very small format motherboards and laptops will eventually drive demand for 1xPCI-e cards?

For that matter - is there any reason for low-end PCI-e graphics cards to be 16x, rather than 8x or even 4x? (They'd still fit in a 16x slot.) I suppose there is no demand - any PCI-e motherboard has a 16x slot, and there isn't anything you'd want to put in it except a GPU. About the only use I can think of is if you wanted one computer to run many low-performance displays - e.g. 8 monitors off four GPUs, each using a 4x slot.

Re:When will old PCI die?

[tdelaney]

Hah - I can answer both of these.

1. There are PCI-e 1x gigabit NICs and some of 1x video cards around. I think I've seen some 1x RAID cards as well, but I wouldn't swear to it.

I've got a PCI-e 1x gigabit NIC I put into machines without onboard gigabit - performance and CPU usage are both excellent. Gigabit on PCI tends to saturate the PCI bus and have much higher CPU usage - you should always check that any onboard gigabit NIC is PCI-e.

2. Tweaktown did some comparisons of a 7300GT on 1x and 16x - the results show significant differences:
http://www.tweaktown.com/reviews/1045/pci_e_x1_gra phics_performance_with_galaxy_geforce_7300gt/index .html

Tom's Hardware have two articles comparing 1x, 4x, 8x and 16x by masking off pins on graphics cards. The performance graphs are very interesting.

Original article - X600XT, X800XT, 6800GT
http://www.tomshardware.com/2004/11/22/sli_is_comi ng/index.html

Newer article - X1900XTX, 8800GTS
http://www.tomshardware.com/2007/03/27/pci_express _scaling_analysis/

The basic conclusion is that you only need 4x for lower-end resolutions and quality, but if you're pushing high-end cards you really want 16x.

Re:When will old PCI die?

[Anonymous Coward]

Probably slightly after we have a PCIe sound card.

I've heard sound card companies bitch that PCIe sucks for sound cards (latency versus bandwidth or something like that), but I don't know and I really don't care.

Once PCIe cards can, in practice, do everything that PCI did, it'll be much easier to switch to PCIe.

Re:When will old PCI die?

[Michael Woodhams]

So (interpolating a little) current high-end cards are bottlenecked by PCI bandwidth at about x12 or less. This means that the next generation high-end can be expected use upcoming PCI-e 2.0 (twice the speed per channel) otherwise they'll bottleneck on x16.

I'm having troubles determining how the cards in the old review (6800GT etc, which do fine on x4) compare to the current generation, but I'm guessing that the current mid-range (e.g. 8500, 7600) are comparable, and could therefore run at x4 without a problem.

Re:When will old PCI die?

[adolf]

PCI Express will finally replace PCI when the newer format becomes capable of doing something useful that the old one could not.

Just a thought, but as it stands, there's just about zero advantage for a home user to switch to 1x PCI-e, which is the same speed as PCI.

Sure, PCI is (usually) a shared bus, while PCI-e is point-to-point, but nobody really gives a fuck because they're all using the SATA and ethernet ports on that are built into the motherboard (which generally get their own bus these days, anyway), and they just don't have anything else which is IO-intensive enough to warrant such a defacto-meaningless change.

Now, if 16x PCI-e slots became the norm, and people find an application which actually requires more throughput, you'd see old-school 32-bit PCI disappear overnight.

The question is, then: When will computers and applications stop being stagnant?

Re:When will old PCI die?

[clarkn0va]

Here's a quad-port gigabit adapter that uses pci-e 4x and up.

Some of Intel's single and dual-port cards plug into 1x and 4x slots, respectively.

db

Re:When will old PCI die?

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, as someone who does a little tech support over on slizone forums (the vid cards are not my specific field, but I know what the NV experts have said), according to posts by a few NV techs over there most cards are lucky to fill an 8x pci-e slot, its only with the 8800 series and if you get SLI to push frame buffers over it that you will actually use the extra bandwidth.

As for the grandparent, I in fact use a 8x pci-e raid card (areca 1210), it was one of the features I purchased my latest mobo for.

And for the wise arse who said that you don't need serial, ps2, etc ports...

A lot of UPS still use serial
Point of Sales gear still uses a lot of serial and ps2

One thing I never "got" was why usb won out over 1394 (firewire, ilink, dv, etc names)? 1394 is faster, more power (can run a desktop HDD from its power supply) and is a peer-to-peer connection, you can network PCs with this stuff very easily (no special cable required).

Re:When will old PCI die?

[MojoStan]

I've never even seen a 1xPCI-e expansion card.
...
Perhaps very small format motherboards and laptops will eventually drive demand for 1xPCI-e cards? I'll add my recent "sighting" (an online review) of an interesting low-profile PCIe x1 card: AVerMedia's AVerTV Combo PCIe M780 card, a combo HDTV/QAM/analog tv tuner card. Reviewed at Gear Digest.

I think this card and AOpen's i945GMt-FSA Mini-ITX motherboard could make a decent HTPC if I could just find a decent-looking Mini-ITX HTPC case.

Re:When will old PCI die?

[DontScotty]

PCI-e was limited to 1 (2 in a SLI-world) slot so that it would be Graphics Cards Only. I believe this was part of a plan to avoid sharing bandwidth since the PCI-E would not be sharing a bus as it needs not hit the bridge.
However - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PCI-e/ tells us of glory on the horizon. "Most new Gigabit Ethernet chips and some 802.11 wireless chips also use PCI Express. Other hardware such as RAID controllers and network cards are also starting to make the switch. Sound cards and other cards providing relatively slow interfaces are still mostly based on PCI as of 2007, but are expected to switch over in the following years."

Re:When will old PCI die?

[prefect42]

Two points:

USB to RS232 converters are cheap, and easily let you have lots of serial ports.
Firewire didn't win because it was backed by the wrong people, and USB is good enough. I'm not disagreeing that firewire is in many cases better, but that's not the point.

Re:When will old PCI die?

[Anonymous Coward]

Have you _tried_ a cheap USB->RS232? If so you wouldn't be making that comment, they work, when and if they want to (and if the gods are in a good mood).

Re:When will old PCI die?

[Antarius]

I used to say the same thing; but that was back when I opted to use VESA cards). I mean, PCI cards could fall out of their slot so much easier than the great ISA 'clamps.'

And as long as there are still motherboards with ISA slots (and cool ISA expansion cards, then PCI will still exist!

Re:When will old PCI die?

[Anonymous Coward]

I actually have had problems with PCIe 1x slots. The slot isn't long enough to be sure you've really seated the card strait. In a perfect world the mainboard would always match up perfect with the case, but there are times when things are just slightly off. PCI cards were just long enough to get it right, but PCIe you can end up unseating the slot with the screw in the back plate.

Re:When will old PCI die?

[whoop]

When will PCI-E die already? I have no use for it. I checked all my closets, and there wasn't a single PCI-E card in any of them. I just don't see any purpose for it at all.

And what's the deal with 4-foot fences with gates around people's yards? What, you're too good to just climb/jump it? I have no problems doing it, and if all you people with gates would just exercise a little you'd be able to as well. That's what's wrong with this country, all you old people who want to work all day and not jump over fences. The world will be a much better place when we grow up, let me tell ya!

Then there's the pinky finger. I hate that thing. One of these days, I'm gonna cut it off, it pisses me off so much. The one or two of you who still do something with it can just buy a pinky-finger-adapter to use while sipping tea and eating crumpets or whatever you do with it.

Re:When will old PCI die?

[Kjella]

The short answer:
Anything that's space-sensitive is already integrated on the mobo, and performance-wise there's no advantage.

The last computer I've bought came with plenty internal connectors (SATA etc.), external connectors (USB, Firewire, eSATA etc.), various features like GBit NIC and 7.1 surround sound and whatnot. The only useful extension card I have left is a TV tuner card. Compare this to a PC from ten years ago (I recently got to study a relic running Win98) and it had half a dozen expansion cards, one for USB, one for sound, one for network and so on. I think it's not as much that PCI-e is bad, it's that expansion cards as such are probably dying. In any case, I wish they would die in their current form, they should be easily removable and hopefully hot-swappable with some sort of click-lock. Having to disassemble a computer to add one is really archaic and a leftover from the original IBM PC.

Re:When will old PCI die?

[Fweeky]

"1x PCI-e, which is the same speed as PCI."

32bit 33MHz PCI gives 133MB/s half duplex. Not even enough to drive a single GigE line and just barely enough for a single HD even if it isn't shared.

1x PCI-Express gives 250MB/s full duplex; double that for PCI-E 2.0.

I fully expect to see the number of PCI slots on new motherboards to slowly drop in pretty much the same way ISA did, especially on workstation/server boards where the's a real need for more bandwidth and simpler interfaces (PCI-X is expensive to make and takes up a lot of space).

What isn't going to happen is an overnight replacement of PCI, because there's far too much stuff out there which still needs it; sound cards, TV cards, "RAID" cards, etc. People were whinging for ISA to be dropped for years before it actually disappeared, and they very eventually got their wish... somewhat after pretty much nobody was using them. How long is it going to take for that to happen with PCI?

Re:When will old PCI die?

[darkwhite]

is there any reason for low-end PCI-e graphics cards to be 16x, rather than 8x or even 4x? Actually, some new low-end graphics cards operate at 4x even though they have a 16x slot interface.

It doesn't really matter: the additional depth on the mobo occupied by the slots is still needed by the CPU and north bridge next to the slots. Perhaps if all the slots became PCIe 4x or lower, they could shave an inch off the back of the mobo, but the biggest space savings come from using low-profile cards, which allow the case to shrink in that dimension.

Another thing that could save a lot of space is if they standardized on slim-height 5.25" drives and bays for them.

Laptop cards are a whole another matter, since modern laptops require such tiny components that to use them in desktops too is usually uneconomical.

Re:When will old PCI die?

[boster]

For home machines sure. If you need to build a server and the application is I/O bound (and, indeed, most people find that CPU is as big a bottleneck as I/O) and want to stay in the x86 world, doing I/O on your PCI-e independent busses is a big help. We used three PCI-e slots: one for GigE, one each for SCSI so each of the two disks got their own controller and bus. The ethernet alone can swamp an old, shared PCI bus, and SATA was not nearly fast enough.

Re:When will old PCI die?

[adolf]

OK, so PCI-E can be a bit faster, but quoting full-duplex speeds is a bit below the belt (whatever the context) -- like walking into a room full of geeks and talking about 2-gigabit Ethernet links, saying that PCI-E supports 250MB/s shows that you are either a marketing tool, or a pathetic moron.

Moving right along:

The percentage of home computers having -any- expansion slots in use these days is vanishingly small. Sound, ethernet, and video are all typically integrated and adequate for all but a gamer. And even then, the gamer is likely to have a video card as the sole expansion card in the system.

This makes it different than the transition from ISA. My first ISA bus computer was an 8088 which eventually had an MFM controller, a serial/parallel/floppy/realtime clock multi-IO card, another serial port card, a Soundblaster card, an EMS RAM expansion card, a video card, and a tape drive interface card.

Some of these cards were in use for more than ten years in one computer or another, because they continued to be useful. They lasted through VESA Local Bus, they lasted through EISA, and even found their way into machines that were primarily PCI.

But nobody does it like that anymore. The only expansion card I, as a geek, need in order to drive special hardware, these days, is a SCSI card...and that will be disappearing as soon as the last of my Plextor CD-ROM drives gives up.

More-typical home users don't even have that problem. There just isn't any legacy hardware to support anymore, so a long and protracted cycle of phasing out hardware need not exist. The times have changed.

Therefore, I stand by my original point: If any good reason to use PCI-E ever shows up, it will replace PCI overnight.

Re:When will old PCI die?

[Fweeky]

OK, so PCI-E can be a bit faster, but quoting full-duplex speeds is a bit below the belt (whatever the context) -- like walking into a room full of geeks and talking about 2-gigabit Ethernet links, saying that PCI-E supports 250MB/s shows that you are either a marketing tool, or a pathetic moron. PCIe 1.1 provides a pair of unidirectional links per lane; one for sending, one for receiving. Each link runs at 2.5GHz using 10/8 encoding: 2500 * (8 / 10) / 8 = 250MB/s; Had I been quoting aggregate bandwidth I'd have said 500MB/s.

In future might I suggest actually looking up well known values before calling someone else a moron for giving them to you?

More-typical home users don't even have that problem. There just isn't any legacy hardware to support anymore, so a long and protracted cycle of phasing out hardware need not exist. No. People still buy sound cards, WiFi cards, TV cards, RAID cards, and so on. A sudden upsurge in PCI-E demand will just result in motherboards with 1 or 2 more PCIe slots and 1 or 2 fewer PCI slots, because people still want to be able to use the expansion cards they already have and will be buying for a good while yet.

For an immediate switchover to make sense, a "good reason" would have to have the majority of people demanding *all* the expansion space in their systems be PCIe, or else, and that seems very unlikely.

Re:When will old PCI die?

[adolf]

Thank you for the correction - it seems that PCIe does not suck as hard as I initially understood, and that you've successfully shed your moron status onto me by your proper use of least-terms while describing bandwidth.

Please allow me to contend that while it does suck a bit less than I thought, it still clearly sucks. A rough quadrupling in overall bandwidth in the 14 years since the introduction of PCI doesn't make me feel very excited about it -- in fact, the sound of one hand clapping in admiration of such a lofty achievement is positively deafening.

That said, I still disagree with you. You keep saying that people are using add-in cards, and I keep seeing that nearly all of the personal computers I come into contact with in my personal and professional life are completely devoid of them, especially now that USB has ceased being a complete abomination.

Time will tell how quick the transition is, but the fact remains that PCI will be far easier to forget about than ISA was.

Re:When will old PCI die?

[Fweeky]

Please allow me to contend that while it does suck a bit less than I thought, it still clearly sucks. A rough quadrupling in overall bandwidth in the 14 years since the introduction of PCI doesn't make me feel very excited about it Well, it's not that bad; you get that on a single lane and it's more than enough for most small cards. It's far simpler to implement and can be made up to 32x wider (yes, I have nfi how you'd actually fit a 32 lane card on anything, but it's there in the spec). Also PCIe 2.0 seems to be getting pushed out quite quickly, so you can double that for supporting cards.

In your last post you were saying we didn't really have a use for more bandwidth than PCI anyway, make up your mind ;)

Time will tell how quick the transition is, but the fact remains that PCI will be far easier to forget about than ISA was. Possibly, but I doubt it will be as immediate as you make out. True, most people probably don't use addon cards, but those who do will have ones they expect to be able to keep using. I can see a lone PCI slot hanging on for good few years yet.

ISA is dead?

[Anonymous Coward]

You can pry my Novell NE2000 board, Sound Blaster Pro, Cirrus Super VGA card, and Promise LBA Extender from my cold, electrocuted hands.

Re:ISA is dead?

[spiderbitendeath]

Sound Blaster Pro? HaHa, I love my Sound Blaster AWE64 Gold. ISA, gold plated stereo RCA outputs, w00t!
And being able to swap out soundfonts anytime I want without any hassle, unlike my Audigy gives me, is great. Love my MIDI collection.
Hey, my Apple Messagepad has a Cirrus Logic graphics chip too! I miss them.

Re:ISA is dead?

[Kazoo the Clown]

I have a Turtle Beach Maui soundcard that I can D/L my own custom 56000 DSP code into. Until you can do that with a $100 non-ISA card, ISA ain't dead...

Re:ISA is dead?

[DaSpudMan]

My Intel Above-board and Hercules graphics adapter will live forever!

IDE graveyard

[Vskye]

This really kinda sucks. I have a computer that needs a few legacy items like IDE, Serial and a parallel port. Why? Well, serial port(s) for my ham radio stuff and a parallel port for my perfectly good HP 6L printer. (might be an unknown issue with the IDE side)
 
I also like to go back and play with a older OS sometimes which doesn't even see a SATA drive. Guess it's time to stock up on a few IDE drives.

Re:IDE graveyard

[Anonymous Coward]

If you'd like to use an older OS then, you can load it up on a VM giving it a virtual IDE. I've done that with quite a few OS that don't recognize SCSI drives.

Re:IDE graveyard

[martijnd]

Come on, you have to keep those Taiwanese manufacturers busy!

USB to Serial dongle
USB to Parallel dongle

Quite nice actually, one little USB hub on the right spot, and just one tiny cable to the PC.

And yes, I am buy my laser printers second hand; the LaserJet 6MP is perfectly fine for most
purposes, and good, low page count second hands go for little money.

Re:IDE graveyard

[calidoscope]

USB to 5 1/4" FD interface???

Re:IDE graveyard

[Vskye]

Come on, you have to keep those Taiwanese manufacturers busy!

USB to Serial dongle
USB to Parallel dongle

Quite nice actually, one little USB hub on the right spot, and just one tiny cable to the PC.

I was going to mention this, but why spend extra money on a adapter? I'd love a current MB that supports USB2, Serial, Parallel, Firewire, Sata, IDE and 2 LAN ports. Dreaming. ;)

Re:IDE graveyard

[PitaBred]

In what form factor, ATX-XL? Give me more, smaller more useful ports. USB2, SATA, GigE, Firewire, and maybe, MAYBE serial. That's what 99% of people need anyway. Let the other 1% with special needs spend the whole $30 to get a port replicator.

Re:IDE graveyard

[zlogic]

Since the first harddrives used a SATA-to-IDE converting chip, I think finding a standalone converter won't be too hard.

Re:IDE graveyard

[Nimey]

Where can you find a 5.25" external floppy drive?

Me, I've got an old Pentium-90 DOS/Linux box with a 3.5"/5.25" dual floppy drive, which uses 3.5" floppy data & power connectors.

I /assume/ the 5.25" part works, but I have no known-good disks to test it with. :-)

It's a bad idea

[Weaselmancer]

Hardware: Seagate to Drop IDE Drives by Year End

They don't work so well after dropping them. I, for one, will not buy one of these dropped drives at any price.

Re:It's a bad idea

[flyingfsck]

I'm sure that sales will bounce back for all the other PATA drive manufacturers though... Sorry, bad pun, can't kick the habit.

Re:It's a bad idea

[buraianto]

Dropping PATA drives gives new meaning to the phrase "flying fsck", doesn't it.

Re:It's a bad idea

[Anonymous Coward]

I, for one, will not buy one of these dropped drives at any price. Well I, for one, welcome our . . . . . aww, *hell* no!

works fine

[r00t]

My 450 MHz CPU is overkill for slashdot.

I don't even have a moving part for the power switch. I own a piece of history: the Mac G4 Cube.

What about SCSI?

[Purity Of Essence]

Surely they aren't going to stop making SCSI drives. The article seems to imply that but I'll chalk it up to pure dumbfuckery on the part of the author.

Re:What about SCSI?

[flyingfsck]

SATA is compatible with Serial SCSI, so I guess SCSI will be given the boot too.

Re:What about SCSI?

[Anonymous Coward]

I really don't believe that........until I hear a SATA drive screaching in concert with with the 24 SCSI drives in my server or the four in my work station for the next two years without failing then I just might accept degrading into the PC world. But don't count on it the tin and tinsel world of PCs is sickening.

right

[r00t]

I'll buy a fucking $20 SATA card and... sit it right next to my Mac G4 Cube?

There is no room for a fucking $20 SATA card, unless... hmmm... Will it blend?

Re:right

[TheRaven64]

As I recall, the Cube can boot from a FireWire drive, so if the worst comes to the worst you can always buy an external FireWire enclosure with a SATA connector and use a disk in that.

Serial ports

[IvyKing]

There are a couple of areas where a USB serial port can not replace a "real" serial port. One is the 1PPS signal from a GPS receiver for timekeeping. Admittedly an esoteric example....

Sun still uses serial ports on their Sparc workstations (e.g. Ultra 25 & 45) as one is used as the console port when running headless.

One final note - serial ports are still useful for connecting to embedded devices as the protocol can be much simpler than USB. Or for that matter, USRobotics Courier modems (the T-1 connection for my worksite is administered remotely using a couple of Courier modems).

Re:Serial ports

[Anonymous Coward]

Q. How many slashdot pedants does it take to screw in a lightbulb?

A. That depends on whether you mean to replace a lightbulb or to have intercourse inside a lightbulb. In the latter case you will need a lightbulb the size of a volkswagen. Perhaps 35 of these would be equal to one Library of Congress.

Re:Serial ports

[Tony Hoyle]

Most routers have serial consoles, and I'm not sure the PPS example is that esoteric.

USB to serial is an extra device, costs money compared to a simple serial cable, and requires drivers (for some reason they still haven't standardised a usb to serial protocol, dammit!). It's a lot of hassle compared to walking up to a router and plugging the laptop into it.

Even more stupid is usb to serial adapters seem to all be cables with fixed plugs on the end, rather than a standard serial port - so you need a different one for each serial standard (I've got 5 here - all incompatible with each other).

Re:Serial ports

[TheRaven64]

for some reason they still haven't standardised a usb to serial protocol, dammit Interestingly, there is a standard for serial over Bluetooth which is very well supported. I haven't, however, seen any Bluetooth serial adaptors for under $100. Something I could plug into an RS-232 port and have it route the serial signal to bluetooth on my laptop would be very useful, especially if it could be powered from the RS-232 port.

PS2 keyboards

[Joce640k]

You can have my Model M keyboard when you pry it from my cold dead fingers....

Re:PS2 keyboards

[Khaed]

Agreed. I see no reason to drop PS/2 just to suck up my USB spots. I know I could get a hub -- but why, when there's already an interface and I have a sturdy keyboard and mouse?

Re:PS2 keyboards

[ozmanjusri]

You can have my Model M keyboard when you pry it from my cold dead fingers....

Your proposal is acceptable.

Re:PS2 keyboards

[British]

The PS/2 ports are to make it so you can accidentally put the mouse in the keyboard port, and the keyboard in the mouse port(wow, great design there guys).

Having USB ports for the mouse & keyboard would take the fun out of that!

Huh, the numlock light is on, but nothing's working.

Re:PS2 keyboards

[dotgain]

Having USB ports for the mouse & keyboard would take the fun out of that!

Don't worry, the speed at which WinXP handles booting up with the mouse and keyboard in different ports than last time more than makes up for that.

Re:PS2 keyboards

[Anonymous Coward]

Dropping both PS/2 ports would give you just about enough room for 4 additional USB ports.

Re:PS2 keyboards

[blackicye]

removing PS/2 ports will allow for even smaller motherboard form factors as well as a marginal cost reduction in manufacture. Besides Model Ms are available in USB flavor, or you could always use a PS/2 - USB adapter.

PATA is long overdue to be obsoleted, even optical drives are starting to come in SATA interface configurations. Next to go should be PCI slots.

Re:PS2 keyboards

[yaroze32]

I agree, My M13 (Black with Teackpoint), from 02-Dec-94 just keep on clicking and clicking and ... well you know ... Clicking.

Re:PS2 keyboards

[Fred_A]

The PS/2 ports are to make it so you can accidentally put the mouse in the keyboard port, and the keyboard in the mouse port(wow, great design there guys).

How else can you have a mouse with 105 buttons ?? Brilliant design I say !

Re:PS2 keyboards

[1u3hr]

Dropping both PS/2 ports would give you just about enough room for 4 additional USB ports.

There's "room" for 20 additional USB ports on the back of my PC without dropping anything.

Re:PS2 keyboards

[stonedcat]

You know because the pictures on the back and color coding of many cables makes it so fucking hard to get it right...

Re:PS2 keyboards

[Nullav]

I'm colorblind, you insensitive clod!

Re:PS2 keyboards

[walt-sjc]

Went down to the local OfficeMax the other day... No SATA optical drives at all. Ditto for Staples. The industry needs a big kick in the nuts to dump old legacy shit. Seagate dumping IDE is a kick in the nuts to OfficeMax and other retailers to wake the fuck up, and start carrying modern accessories. Even buying a DVI cable is a painful process - you are lucky if you have ONE to choose from (there are 8325 flavors of the frickin pinout, with monitors and cards keyed so only ONE cable type works...)

If you have a legacy IDE system, you can always get IDE to sata converters. Ditto for PS/2 to USB.

Really old legacy PC's just are not worth the trouble. If you have need for a low-end firewall box (always the stated use for an ancient box) you are better off with an embedded device running openWRT or something similar. A big old Pentium 133 that can't boot off a CD just needs to be retired already.

I'm just blown away that nearly every modern motherboard still has IDE, parallel, serial, and PS/2 ports. Hard to find ones that don't. I don't want the interrupts wasted! I don't want the board real estate wasted! I want more USB and ESATA ports on the back panel instead... Heck, if you feel you REALLY need the ports on the motherboard, put them on a header that I can extend to a few jacks on a PCI slot bracket, but I would prefer that they not be there at all.

Re:PS2 keyboards

[Nullav]

Next to go should be PCI slots.

I have a feeling you'll be waiting a while for that. Not all of us like to buy new sound/tuner cards when we build a new machine. (Although, I suppose everything fails eventually.) It'd probably take around five years to wean everyone off PCI.

I really don't see so many people want to keep PS/2 ports around. I can pick up a PS/2-USB adapter for $0.30.

Re:PS2 keyboards

[Urza9814]

Yes! I love all my Model Ms. I will never go to USB! well, without buying an adapter first :)

Re:PS2 keyboards

[GiMP]

Except that the Model:M isn't compatible with all of the PS/2->USB adapters and those adapters, well, quite frankly -- suck.

For instance, with my adapter, when I'm holding shift or ctrl for 5 seconds, it silently "forgets" that I'm holding the key. This is annoying when I'm paging in xterm (shift+page[up/dn]), hunting for a lost session in screen, etc. For games its beyond annoying, as your keyboard casually "forgets" that you're walking forward every 5 seconds.

Re:PS2 keyboards

[JayAEU]

I'm just blown away that nearly every modern motherboard still has IDE, parallel, serial, and PS/2 ports. Hard to find ones that don't. I don't want the interrupts wasted! I don't want the board real estate wasted!

Then by all means, go ahead and disable all the interfaces you don't need/want in the BIOS. This will free up your precious IRQs (what for?) and allows the rest of the world to connect their trusty equipment to the legacy interfaces.

Re:PS2 keyboards

[afidel]

The reason to drop PS/2 is that then you can remove the ISA emulation logic from the Southbridge. On most modern designs the PS/2 controller is the only component still using that part of the chip so you can drop it if you drop the ports.

Re:PS2 keyboards

[Blackknight]

The keyboard port is always on the bottom, it's not that hard to remember.

Re:PS2 keyboards

[walt-sjc]

You can't disable the legacy PS/2 keyboard interface on any motherboard I've seen. This also doesn't address my other (larger) concern that I don't want the back panel (or motherboard) real estate wasted. Did you even read my post or is your comment a knee-jerk response to one sentence? I even gave manufacturers an out - a motherboard header with PCI bracket connectors for legacy crap.

Does anyone use PS/2 keyboards / mice anymore? Why can't you use USB adapters? The old parallel printer port is WAY too slow for modern color printers. Too much info. Again, if you NEED a legacy parallel port for a legacy printer, get a USB adapter or better yet, an ethernet print server that has a parallel port.

There are Many common and cheap solutions for legacy devices. No need for the old physical legacy ports to waste the precious real estate on the back panel area.

Re:PS2 keyboards

[Urza9814]

Well that's why you get a proper adapter. I believe the main problem with them is that the Model M uses an unusually large amount of power. Have you tried the officially supported one from clickykeyboards.net? Might need a converter instead of an adapter.

Re:PS2 keyboards

[pomerol]

I have a very old Fujitsu keyboard with excellent key layout and feel. It has an AT connector which I now plug into an AT-to-PS2 adapter which plugs into a PS2-to-USB adapter which finally plugs into my new Shuttle XPC that does not have a PS2 port. The absence of legacy ports on the Shuttle was one of the many reasons I bought it.

I expect that someone will have to pry my old Fujitsu keyboard from my cold dead fingers, and by then the list of adapters will be longer.

And finally, yes, all my storage devices in the Shuttle use SATA connectors.

Re:PS2 keyboards

[plague3106]

Does anyone use PS/2 keyboards / mice anymore?

Yup. I have a KVM that does, and only one USB mouse, and no USB keyboards. I don't see the need to throw away a keyboard that I like when its still working just so the plug can change. I also don't have that many USB ports to begin with (4 total).

Your adapters only work if the hardware you are attempting to adapt support it. It doesn't work with a standard PS2 mouse, only wants that say PS2 / USB. Same for keyboards.

Why should I have to buy all this other hardware because you think there's a lack of room on the back of PCs?

Re:PS2 keyboards

[GiMP]

The "adapters" that I have are active converters with electronics inside as you describe, but that doesn't solve the "KEYDOWN timeout" that I'm describing -- unless there are circuits out there that don't have this limitation. ( I don't doubt it, but I don't plan to purchase every one on the market until I find one that works well)

Re:PS2 keyboards

[jandrese]

But I like my v.1 natural MS keyboard, and I'm not jumping to upgrade it anytime soon, despite it's PS2 nature.

I also lament the loss of serial ports on most new motherboards. I still use the serial port on a fairly regular basis (lots of hardware has RS232 diagnostic ports), and USB->Serial converters are surprisingly flaky (although not that surprising I guess, UARTs have tiny buffers and tight timing because everybody still seems to use chips from 1980 to make them. I even have some PCMCIA serial cards that are worthless for anything beyond a chat session with a Cisco, the looser timings on the PC-Card slot make it impossible to send any bulk data across the serial link without overflowing/underflowing.

I am a bit surprised that floppy ports are still a standard feature. We've already lost one of the PATA ports but that useless floppy port still hangs on.

Re:PS2 keyboards

[mashade]

It's funny, but you're right! All you have to do is switch ports and Windows takes its time shuffling drivers around before you can log in. Grrr wtf is the difference?

Re:PS2 keyboards

[pla]

Does anyone use PS/2 keyboards / mice anymore?

Yes, on a daily basis.

You speak from (apparently) only your experience with home or office-worker PC hardware. In business world (the one most OEMs care about - Home use counts as nothing more than trickle-down), you have instrumentation frontends using embedded or irreplaceable dedicated old PCs; Same goes for machine (large automated cutters/welders/etc) controllers. Servers ALMOST ALWAYS have PS2 to support KVMs (USB gets really flakey when you switch it, and few admins want to deal with finding the correct keyboard and mouse out of the forty dangling from each rack).



There are Many common and cheap solutions for legacy devices. No need for the old physical legacy ports to waste the precious real estate on the back panel area.

And the Real Thing(tm) almost always works far, far better than interface converters . As for back panel real-estate... What do you have back there that you need more space for? You can fit two PS2, one parallel and two serial ports, VGA and DVI, dual-NIC, six USB and two 1394, and 6-channel audio plus SP/DIF just fine in the standard ATX style cutout (I have a board with all of those except the DVI, and yes, you could indeed fit it just fine). Seriously - What more do you want on there?

Re:PS2 keyboards

[raddan]

Yes, but you know-- there's actually no reason not to allow you to plug a mouse into a keyboard's PS/2 port and vice-versa, except that it allows motherboard manufacturers to cut some costs on the second controller for the mouse. That's why the color-coding was introduced-- so that people wouldn't try plugging one into the other. Before AC'97, I had several computers (including my beloved ThinkPad 365CD) that didn't care which one you plugged it into, because the controller was the same on both ports. It's basically just a fancy serial port.

Re:PS2 keyboards

[mollymoo]

You can have my Model M keyboard when you pry it from my cold dead fingers....

After all that clicking gives you vibration white finger?

Re:PS2 keyboards

[WhoBeDaPlaya]

That's a little arrogant, wouldn't you say? I just upgraded a bunch of systems at the folks (~6) to overclocked Core 2 E4300s. They all had perfectly servicable hard drives (ranging from a WD Caviar SE 80GB to Seagate Barracuda 7200.7 200GB) and optical drives (8x DL burners). The ABIT IB9 boards I chose are about the only ones with two IDE channels (ITE8211 rather than craptastic JMicron), so that was nice.
Are you volunteering to send me some $$$ for the unnecessary expense of switching to SATA devices?

Re:PS2 keyboards

[LWATCDR]

The old parallel printer port works great for all sorts of interfacing projects as well as things like Pic programmers and such. A USB adapter and or Ethernet printer server will not work for that.
I use my serial port every day for embedded development.
USB devices for a lot of are coming on like but frankly they tend to be Windows centric.
Then you have devices like Closed Captioning encoders. They tend to only come with an RS-232 interface and or a 1200 baud modem interface.
As someone pointed out USB to serial adapters are not all that reliable. And I have yet to see a USB extender as cheap as a 100ft serial cable. You can run RS-232 I think 150ft according to specs. You could use RS-232->Ethernet adapters but then you are taking up a port on your hub and they are not as cheap as a good old serial cable.

Re:PS2 keyboards

[Analogy Man]

But if your hanging off the back of your desk with the blood running to your head while you plug them in....which way is up?

Re:PS2 keyboards

[Nimey]

Does anyone use PS/2 keyboards / mice anymore?

I /like/ my Model Ms, and I'm too cheap to spend $70 each on a new USB model, or $30 each on converters. Also, sometimes BIOSes have buggy real-mode support for USB keyboards, such that you can't use grub's boot menu.

Re the parallel port, that's how I print to my Color Laserjet 2550. Wife uses the USB port since she prints more often, and I don't print enough to care about the relative speed.

That said, yeah, I'd wish for more motherboards with fewer legacy ports. One PS/2 port for sure, and maybe with a header and included expansion thingy for parallel and 9-pin serial. It's been long enough that we shouldn't have to worry about game ports. :-) And drop VGA for DVI-I already!

Re:PS2 keyboards

[jweller]

Went down to the local OfficeMax the other day... No SATA optical drives at all. Ditto for Staples. The industry needs a big kick in the nuts to dump old legacy shit. Seagate dumping IDE is a kick in the nuts to OfficeMax and other retailers to wake the fuck up, and start carrying modern accessories.

That makes perfect sense in my mind. most of the people who go to the big box stores to purchase a piece of PC hardware, are replacing a broken part on an older, out of warranty, machine and want/need the part right now. SATA hasn't been around long enough to have large numbers of failures on machines out of warranty. When people start demanding the stuff, OfficeMax will have it.

Re:PS2 keyboards

[Analogy Man]

Amen! I have a shuttle PC for my kids and think the Mac Mini's are brilliant (although I don't have one).

If you get down the the bare essentials, the back of a PC would need a USB block, network, power and video. You could optionally have sound. If you went to solid state storage and used an external DVD drive on an as-needed basis it could be a very tidy little package.

I have thought that an interesting approach would be to then have the top of the unit be ribbed copper mounted directly to CPU. It could be one sleek little machine.

Re:PS2 keyboards

[shaitand]

'removing PS/2 ports will allow for even smaller motherboard form factors as well as a marginal cost reduction in manufacture. Besides Model Ms are available in USB flavor, or you could always use a PS/2 - USB adapter.'

Forget space, there are very practical reasons for keeping keyboards a PS/2 Port. The fact is, if I have a functional keyboard plugged into a PS/2 port it just works, no special settings or configuration, no checking for compatibility or support. It works in simple utilities loaded off boot disks and rescue modes and recovery systems. It works to turn on usb keyboard support in the bios. It works to install operating systems. It just works.

As a technician in the field I encounter problems and frustrations with USB keyboards regularly. Microsoft knows this. If you purchase a wireless keyboard from them the mouse plugs into the usb port an the keyboard has a PS/2 connector (not that mice don't have the same issues but you can usually use the keyboard to do what you need). I praise the FSM that most usb keyboards come with an adapter to plug into a PS/2 port. Again, it isn't as if you see many boards these days that don't have usb ports, its because the manufacturers are all too aware of the problems I'm referring to.

'PATA is long overdue to be obsoleted, even optical drives are starting to come in SATA interface configurations.'

STARTING to come in SATA configurations is NOT long due to be obsoleted. I want my technology obsoleted when actually being functionally irrelevant makes it obsolete and removing support for it to be a simple recognition of that fact.

I really don't care that much about Seagate not manufacturing new drives in SATA because I'm not going to buy new drives with an old interface when the new interface is SLIGHTLY faster. What pisses me off is the motherboards that are being shipped with one IDE connection that can't be used for booting and that will for me to buy several hundred dollars worth of new drives that currently don't perform much better than the ones I've got.

'Next to go should be PCI slots.'

Same problem as IDE. You do realize some of us have expansion cards other than video cards right? Most cards on the market are PCI.

Re:PS2 keyboards

[Punchinello]

I'm not sure I want retailers dumping the upgrade/replacement parts I need for otherwise perfectly good PCs that I have. I admit I have purchased SATA cards for systems with IDE only on the motherboard, but I have PCs where this is simply not possible as I am out of PCI slots.

It would be a disaster if retailers immediately dumped old technology when new stuff came to market. More people have IDE drives at home than SATA at the moment. That is why retailers still carry the old stuff. That is what is in demand. The only reason I could see for vanishing the technology immediately would be to force obsolescence and drive the new PC sales market.

Re:PS2 keyboards

[Anonymous Coward]

Not sure what system you're using. My PS/2 ports are always next to each other horizonally.

Re:PS2 keyboards

[mrbooze]

But mine are side-by-side!

Re:PS2 keyboards

[b0bby]

I have my Model M plugged into a cheap Hawking 2 port USB KVM, even though I'm not currently using the other port. It works fine, though I don't use it for games so I'm not sure if it would mess up like that.

Re:PS2 keyboards

[TeknoHog]

How else can you have a mouse with 105 buttons ?? Brilliant design I say !

Judging by the current average number of buttons on a mouse, and the tendency for Windows users to do absolutely everything with a mouse (because, obviously, a modern GUI must be easier than using a 1960s text terminal style keyboard), I'd say we're not so far from the mouse you can type with.

Re:PS2 keyboards

[bobcat7677]

Agreed! I avoid USB keyboards whenever possible. I only keep one laying around for special situations. On slower boxes you can see the slow down with the usb keyboard plugged in. Not worth the trouble. So much nicer to just have a dedicated port to plug in keyboards.

Re:PS2 keyboards

[dickens]

Then there's always 20ma current-loop for those longer runs.. Anyone else remember when "EIA RS232" was the _new_ standard?

Re:PS2 keyboards

[dfghjk]

...and it's only laziness that makes that a problem. It's possible, and has been done, to make the keyboard and mouse ports autodetect.

Re:PS2 keyboards

[Anonymous Coward]

Stupid anecdote, but not 2-3 years ago we had a series of HP/Compaq mini desktops that actually puked if you plugged the USB keyboard and mouse into the "wrong" slots.

Dumb thing expected them to be inserted into particular slots in the back. Never did figure that out.

Re:PS2 keyboards

[drsquare]

The keyboard port is always on the bottom, it's not that hard to remember.

But mine are left and right.

Re:PS2 keyboards

[Sycraft-fu]

I'd recommend getting their Natural Keyboard 4000. It is, by far, the finest ergonomic keyboard I've ever used. It'll get you a USB enabled keyboard, but it worth it even if you don't care. Really, really well designed.

Re:PS2 keyboards

[cayenne8]

"Does anyone use PS/2 keyboards / mice anymore?"

Yup. I've got about 3 Dells that do, and a few generic PC's put together that all use PS/2.

The Sun boxes I got were the first ones I ever saw that used USB for mouse/keyboard, and then the Macs.

But, all my PC's in the house use PS/2...same with most of my friends' computers.

Re:PS2 keyboards

[flappinbooger]

Put a matching ribbed lid on it, and a hot cpu, and you have a George Foreman Grill.

Re:PS2 keyboards

[MBGMorden]

I'm a big fan of mechanical switch keyboards as well. I use an old Smith Corona mech switch model at home - strangely I've never found any mention, blurb, or picture of one of them online. I found the one I have at a thrift store for $0.99. The thing is built like a tank but has far less "extra space" around it than the IBM models (no wordperfect cheat-sheet stand on this one :D). Only thing I DON'T like about it is that it has this coil cord that gets in the way compared to a straight one, and it doesn't have Windows keys which makes it a) a little more annoying to use on my Windows PC, and b) impossible to use on my Mac (even with USB adapter).

That being said, there are (at least for Macs) a few mech switch keyboards beying made with USB interfaces now: http://www.sforh.com/keyboards/tactile-pro.html

(at $184 for a keyboard it's expensive, but I'm still seriously eyeing this thing).

Re:PS2 keyboards

[X0563511]

The one closer to the motherboard, 90% of the time. The other 10%, just try it and see... not like it damages anything.

Re:PS2 keyboards

[Khaed]

You assume they'd add four more ports instead of doing what most companies would do and just pocket the $0.10 or less difference per board. They could drop the onboard sound and put more USB there, too, but good luck finding a mobo without onboard sound.

Re:PS2 keyboards

[h3]

You can still have fun figuring out which orientation the USB plug should go in while you are crouched under your desk. Great design,USB guys! I owe you a punch in the face!

Re:PS2 keyboards

[walt-sjc]

Sorry you haven't been able to upgrade your systems since 1998... Must suck.

Guys:

I'm not talking about OLD systems. If you are putting together a NEW SYSTEM with a NEW MOTHERBOARD,
you are probably going to need a new power supply, disks, etc. ANYWAY.

It is bizarre to keep using a 15 year old keyboard / mouse on a brand new system - those things get disgusting!

Re:PS2 keyboards

[walt-sjc]

We are not talking about OLD SLOW LEGACY systems here. We are talking NEW. NEW motherboards have VERY good USB keyboard support. There are NO performance issues with NEW equipment with USB keyboards.

Re:PS2 keyboards

[walt-sjc]

I'm sure that there will be some specialty motherboard companies that will continue to service people who want to continue to use old, slow hard drives on their new fast system. Of course, I don't really under stand WHY you would want to do that... It's like putting in a 4" water pipe for a 5/8" hose. But again, sata/IDE adapters are only about $20...

Re:PS2 keyboards

[walt-sjc]

Funny, I thought the fact that I was looking for parts they didn't carry indicated "demand."

It's kind of hard to judge "demand" for something if you have no way to gauge the metric. Sales is such a way. No product, no sales, no demand.

Re:PS2 keyboards

[Wolfrider]

--I'm with you. Leave my PS/2 port(s) alone pls - just make them kbd/maus interchangeable, like some laptops do. // Likes my ps/2 keyb0rd /// It is teh preeecious

Re:PS2 keyboards

[Wolfrider]

--D00d - back off, mang.

[[
Does anyone use PS/2 keyboards / mice anymore? Why can't you use USB adapters? The old parallel printer port is WAY too slow for modern color printers.
]]

--Yes, AAMOF I'm using a ps/2 keyboard right now, along with a USB mouse. I shouldn't have to go buy a stupid USB adapter for my existing HW (that works just fine the way it is.)

--There are other things that use parallel ports besides printers. For instance, I happen to still have an Original Iomega 100MB Zip drive - you telling me I have to give that up just cuz of your "precious backboard real estate?" Get real.

Re:PS2 keyboards

[paganizer]

I have running:
a SLOT A thunderbird board with PS/2 type M keyboard and basic 2-button ibm mouse, ISA slots (for my Sound Blaster AWE64 board, my daughter plays with Midi), who's primary job is to act as a network interface for my Lexmark Optra laser printer and my old parallel scanner. it also has a Matrox Marvel 2 video capture card in it and a VCR sitting nearbye, for when I feel like copying my old VHS collection to DVD.
A IBM Server 320, which I use as secondary domain controller, which I hook up all my SCSI stuff to, I only power this up to make backups to it. once again, Type M and 2-button IBM mouse.
My sons computer is a tbird 1100, with type M and a logitech PS/2 mouse. his only complaint with it is it won't play Oblivion. with a upgraded video card, it would.
MY main computer is a AMD 3000XP, with a (wait for it) Type M keyboard and a USB Logitech mouse. the only reason i'm using a USB one is that my PS/2 mouse wore out, and I like thumb ball mice. I use the firewire more than I use the USB.
In the basement, I've got a DX4-120, VLB, ISA system that I keep around for when I want to play Masters of Magic, Harpoon 2 or Wing Commander or any of the other fantastic games that it is a complete pain in the ass to run in emulation. it's also just a freakin' neat machine to keep alive to show off.
The only system that we really use the USB on is my laptop, a 17" core duo HP. it gets all the cameras plugged in to it via USB, and I sometime use the USB to charge and/or backup our phones or my palm TX.
I won't go into the Solaris & other weird stuff.
So yeah, I use PS/2. it's easier. I'll keep using it in order to make use of the still valuable and perfectly usable hardware i purchased over the years, rather than blindly running out and buying stuff that in many cases JUST WOULDN'T WORK AS WELL, like the the Marvel 2, the AWE-64, and of course, the bulletproof, last forever, type M keyboard.

Re:PS2 keyboards

[paganizer]

By the way, if anyone who has had a Matrox Marvel 2 has managed to find something better at doing what it does, I would appreciate a heads-up.

Re:PS2 keyboards

[Mal-2]

If you have a newer but less lovable keyboard of similar type, you may be able to swap the cables between them and get rid of one converter at least. I have done this to update a couple of keyboards now, when their less durable but more recent kin have bitten the dust.

I suspect I have the exact same clicky Fujitsu keyboard you do, and it is doing quite well with the PS/2 style cable taken off some $10 model I picked up at a swap meet. I know adapters are cheaper than $10, but it's not like you would be rendering the $10 keyboard useless -- it can have the old AT-style cable and adapter and serve as backup.

Sadly, the clickyboard is on its last legs (or leg, I think one of them broke off a long time ago) -- I have had to place supplemental springs under a couple keys now. Fortunately the keys in question are PgDn and F12, so the stiffer action doesn't pose much of a problem. I have also placed booster springs under Caps Lock, but not because it is broken. I just want it to be hard to press. Even my keyboard here at work has a rubber band underneath the Caps Lock, and it takes a good 20 pounds or more of force to activate it. It is not something I can do accidentally.

Mal-2

Re:PS2 keyboards

[Lord Apathy]

Not True! My mouse and keyboard ports run left to right. Or is that right to left. Well anyway, my mouse port is the one on the left. I think. Just a second. Yeah.. its the one on the left.

Re:PS2 keyboards

[Starteck81]

How else can you have a mouse with 105 buttons ?? Brilliant design I say !

105 button mouse? Steve Jobs would have a conniption fit.

Re:PS2 keyboards

[dickens]

I have to concur on the Natural Keyboard 4000. I have two of them. They do have some quality issues.. as in the ":" keys has gone weird on the one I have at home. But there is really nothing else like them for any price.

Re:PS2 keyboards

[Hucko]

I don't have a usb keyboard. Don't see why I should waste one my precious 8 usb ports on such basic devices. Couldn't get a optical mouse with ps2, otherwise I would have. I like the ps2 ports for the exclusive use of keyboard/mice. Keyboards, mice and monitors should always have dedicated ports imho. They tend to be static peripherals, so I don't see the advantage of universal ports, in their case.

Re:PS2 keyboards

[toddestan]

I am a bit surprised that floppy ports are still a standard feature. We've already lost one of the PATA ports but that useless floppy port still hangs on.

Well, how else are you supposed to install Windows XP now that you can only get SATA drives? (yeah, I know about slipstreaming. It's a joke, laugh)

Re:PS2 keyboards

[Tacvek]

I can confirm this. I had a laptop with a single PS2 port. You could use either a PS/2 mouse or keyboard in it. For the other item you had to use USB or the built-in component.

Re:PS2 keyboards

[Vidar Leathershod]

And even Sun's USB implementation was not perfect. Startup key sequences would not work properly from USB, (maybe not initialized yet?). PS/2, ADB, and whatever Sun called it's interface worked just fine, under almost any condition. Unplug a PS/2 mouse, plug a different one in, and it usually just works. Unplug a USB mouse, plug a different one in, and wait for the "HID driver" to be installed before you can move it.

With ADB, it was almost impossible to lock up a Mac so much that you couldn't do a three-fingered salute, or a force quit. With USB, as soon as the OS hits trouble, the USB keyboard becomes useless. I'm guessing that the ADB port had certain hardware interrupts that allowed it to be more robust. Also, the USB implementations on some machines meant that some customers would be typing far faster than the computer could get from the keyboard.

The short story is that USB is a horrible standard, with a crazy plug shape. If there is a standard for positioning it, few follow it. Plugging in devices using USB is a nightmare, and I've seen plenty of blue screens/strange behavior from them. Firewire, ADB, and PS/2 should be all we need. I can't picture anything USB can do that Firewire and either PS/2 or ADB cannot, and do it better than USB.

Re:PS2 keyboards

[Nullav]

And drop VGA for DVI-I already!

Not too good an idea on budget systems and servers. If I'm putting together a cheap system for someone, I'm either getting a 15" LCD for $30, which likely won't have a DVI pinout, or a 15-17" CRT for the same price (because cheap LCDs suck, for the most part), which will definitely not have a DVI pinout.
The only place I can see dropping VGA ports make sense would be high-end video cards and motherboards. If I'm spending 20 on a motherboard I want good legacy support.n\

Re:PS2 keyboards

[bobcat7677]

Get off my lawn. Darn kids!

Re:PS2 keyboards

[jandrese]

Easy, you install Vista instead.

Re:PS2 keyboards

[cecil_turtle]

There is a USB logo on one side of the plug which normally goes "up". Anyway there are only two possibilities with USB, whereas with PS/2 there are 4 core directions if you don't know which way the port is oriented, and sometimes the ports are off by 10 or 20 degrees so it ends up going in at some funny angle and you have to rotate the plug until it inserts.

Re:PS2 keyboards

[blackicye]

Actually, IDE to SATA converters do exist. They are abundant here in SE Asia, Stateside you probably have to buy them online. Newegg and mwave will almost definately have them.

Re:PS2 keyboards

[blackicye]

Unplug a PS/2 mouse, plug a different one in, and it usually just works. Unplug a USB mouse, plug a different one in, and wait for the "HID driver" to be installed before you can move it.

Actually on many older boards, unplugging then replugging a PS/2 Keyboard will either cause the system to hang, or require a reboot to initialize the keyboard.

Re:PS2 keyboards

[blackicye]

--There are other things that use parallel ports besides printers. For instance, I happen to still have an Original Iomega 100MB Zip drive - you telling me I have to give that up just cuz of your "precious backboard real estate?" Get real.

I'm sure that zip drive is still (somehow) relevant now, but you should probably consider tossing it out in the next 2 or 3 years if and when you buy a new PC.

If you're expecting manufacturers to continue putting legacy interfaces and devices on the market, you need to "get real"

Re:PS2 keyboards

[Vidar Leathershod]

Much older boards, yes. That is also true for ADB (Till the PowerMacs around 1994, it was not recommended to hot plug adb). But it really is a non-issue for swapping, and the need for swapping a keyboard and mouse while the computer is on is not all that common anyway.

Re:PS2 keyboards

[Trogre]

What? OfficeMax was out of staples?

BTW, some of us still need those legacy connectors. In fact we're struggling to find boards with enough PATA/RS-232/PCI connectors for our needs.

Oh boy. I'll probably hate myself for this

[iminplaya]

Yes. And you can stop showering.

Re:Oh boy. I'll probably hate myself for this

[shish]

Can I grow a beard, stop showering, *and* use recent technology?

Re:Damnit, I knew it!

[nrgy]

I'm not going to lie one day while swapping a drive out of a little machine I used as a server, I took it out and TOSSED yes TOSSED it over on my bed 2 feet away. Oh the horror of watching it not land flat but instead vertical and on one corner, the wonderful bouncing across my bed that ensued was only the precursor to it falling off the other side and onto the floor. Needless to say that drive never booted again :D

Yes. Re:Does it really matter?

[twitter]

There are a number of ways that this is annoying. It's wasteful, painful and not really justified by a technical improvement.

SATA is right up there with ACPI for buggy implementation. For free software users, this is not good news but it's right in time for the Vista upgrade train.

It's also bad news for people who just want to keep using the drives they own. I've got older drives that do just fine as boot devices. I'd rather retire them for solid state devices than the same old mechanical stuff with a different plug.

The speeds might be better, but it's not SCSI class and you could get 20x that if you used a parallel cable.

Save yourself some trouble...

[Joce640k]

Save yourself some trouble...do a clean install now and image the freshly installed drive.

A future "reinstall" will take you two minutes.

well, shit.

[thegnu]

shit. can I get a hand? what the hell are you all doing sitting around letting me make myself look stupid?

bastards.

Re:well, shit.

[Hal_Porter]

You are the reason that checkins to main\Latest are banned ;-)

and employees get six. <--joke
                  ^
                  |
                joke

i.e.
<ecode>
and employees get six. <--joke
                                    ^
                                    |
                                  joke
</ecode>

Exercise 1: What do I type to get &, < and > outside an ecode block?
Exercise 2: What about inside an ecode block?
Exercise 3: Why is your joke funny?

Re:well, shit.

[thegnu]

1. the &lt thing only works if you put a ; at the end of it.
2. it
3. couldn't tell ya

Re:well, shit.

[Short Circuit]

can I get a hand?

0 . ^ .0 0
0.l l l l0 0
l l l l 1/^0
0\ . . . ./0
0 \ . . ./0
 
000101010000
011010101000
101010101110
0 10000000010
001000000100

There ya go. Pretty easy, once you get through the blasted lameness filter. I'd use lorem ipsum, but I don't Slashdotters would appreciate it much. So far, in the time it's taken me to get this past the lameness filter, your post went from a "2 Funny" to a "3 Funny". I wonder how many other people are attempting to craft a response as well. Let's see if using 'l's will get me past the "Too many junk characters" filter. Yup. Now I see that Slashdot doesn't support <pre>, and <tt> is broken. How about <ecode<? Nope. Gotta find something for those spaces. Ah! How about alternating periods and asterisks for a dark background? Ah! Too many junk characters again. Let's alternate the asterisks with spaces. Nope...Replacing the asterisks with zeros works, but now you can't really see the hand. Ah, heck. Let's make a 0/1 bitmap. That's funny...it added a space in the middle of one of the (short!) lines. Let's append spaces to each line...Didn't work. Ah hell, now your post is at "4 Funny". I'll leave both hands up.

Long story short, don't bother with the ascii art.

Re:well, shit.

[Anonymous Coward]

Lorem ipsum - come on, desktop publishing has been around since the 80s. Tons of slashdotters will have run into it.

Re:well, shit.

[tgd]

And after all that effort from you guys, I still don't get the joke.

Re:well, shit.

[Jogar the Barbarian]

http://supersilly.com/~greg/images/ninja_kewpie.jp g

</utterlyofftopic>

IDE?

[kayditty]

Technically, it's still IDE. The cabling is different. The drive electronics are still integrated, and the underlying technology is still nearly identical, so far as I know.

Re:IDE?

[chemicaloli]

Out of interest what do you use this machine for?

Re:IDE?

[Anonymous Coward]

I would suggest upgrading the controller to an RLL one. Typically you can keep the drive and get higher capacity out of it, though you'll of course have to low-level format it (the old debug trick to get into that bios routine..)

Re:IDE?

[Creepy Crawler]

---Out of interest what do you use this machine for?

Doorstop.

Re:IDE?

[confused one]

It's actually in a product test stand. Scary, no?

slashdot nerds not nerdy about terminology?

[Anonymous Coward]

May the collective Slashdot mind forgive my anonymous cowardliness if I am wrong, but it is my understanding that ALL modern hard drives are of the IDE variety, Integrated Drive Electronics. That just means that the electronics are soldered to the drive along with the platters rather than a card or something else, correct? I see multiple people referring to IDE drives and IDE channels but http://electronics.howstuffworks.com/ide.htm/ also agrees that IDE is not the true name for the interface standard; just that since almost all IDE drives are of the Parallel ATA variety, the two terms are used interchangeably. Should the rapid onset of Serial ATA (rightly) make us change our terminology?

Re:slashdot nerds not nerdy about terminology?

[HeroreV]

This battle has already been lost. "IDE" refers to PATA or integrated development environments. Using "IDE" to refer to SATA and other stuff is just going to confuse people.

Re:slashdot nerds not nerdy about terminology?

[juhaz]

Sorry, but as you say, they ARE used interchangeably, it doesn't matter what the acronym originally meant, or that it's too generic, today IDE and ATA are synonyms. It is also a fact that IDE was the original name for the interface and ATA was adopted later to avoid the very ambiguity we're talking about, but by then, it was too late, since the name was everywhere.

You're really begging for it if you start to refer to SCSI drives as IDE because they have integrated electronics.

IDE?

[confused one]

That's not to say support for the 21-year-old PATA standard is going to vanish overnight; similar to how ISA slots were available long after most of us had ditched our old ISA peripherals."
I'm still using a MFM drive with an ISA controller in an 8MHz AT!

Re:Time to upgrade

[Technician]

What will I do when my drive dies again?

Upgrade.

I finaly let go my 286 and Windows 3.1. Try Ubuntu on a Core 2 Duo. You will like it.

On a more realistic note. I still have a P III system running Windows 98 because it runs my GPS map software, has real serial ports for the GPS, and runs the piano tutor sofware using the MPU-401 port. When it's drive dies, it will be time to shop for a machine with the required hardware.

Re:Damnit, I knew it!

[ireallylovelinux]

I used a drive that had a hole in one of the chips.
Once I connected it a huge flame developed.
I could smell silicon throughout the old room.
I knew I shouldn't of bought that drive at a hamfest.

Re:Oh f*#!.

[pookemon]

Buy a SATA card? Get a new motherboard? Join the revolution?

It's not all legacy hardware...

[WIAKywbfatw]

My PVR is less than a year old. It, as well as the HD model that's now part of the same range, both use IDE drives. In fact, I believe that most PVR models do the same.

The recommended replacement drives (or upgrade drives for those looking for more capacity) are from Seagate: the .

If/when Seagate pulls out of this market, the price of new PVRs probably won't be affected at all, but it may well drive the price of repairing/upgrading existing models up a bit.

Bottom line to PVR users: upgrade that drive while you can.

What about USB enclosures?

[baeksu]

As far as I've seen, most USB enclosures have IDE harddisks inside them. The same is probably true for firewire as well. So there's still a lot of IDE harddisks on the market, and people do want bigger capacities as well.

Of course as a private company, Seagate are welcome to do as they please. There's still a few other manufacturers out there.

For desktop PCs, I think it would be silly to buy IDE-to-SATA converters. At least the ones in Korea cost close to 30 bucks. Most of the IDE harddisks people have are probably around 100-250 GB size, and you can already get that size SATA drives for less than 50 bucks. So the converter is not much of an investment really.

Re:What about USB enclosures?

[jimicus]

Quite a few of them are moving towards SATA drives.

Seagate should know their market. If a tiny fraction of their sales consist of PATA drives, sooner or later it's going to be just as cheap/easy to drop the PATA drives from the product line altogether and retool that part of the factory to make SATA drives. With any luck they can then produce them slightly cheaper.

Re:What about USB enclosures?

[wesley96]

I do agree that the converters aren't effective investment these days, but I can get the converters in Korea for around 15 bucks. You should try some price-compare websites like Danawa or Enuri.

I personally bought the opposite kind to get my SATA drive to work on an external enclosure using PATA interface, and the price for this was around 15 bucks as well. This was a good investment in the sense that the enclosures sold these days even now mostly use PATA and the ones compatible with SATA are far and few in between, not to mention expensive.

Re:What about USB enclosures?

[bomanbot]

Yeah, but that would only affect people like me who like to buy their external enclosures and harddrives seperately and also would possibly like to change the drives into something bigger someday.

For the majority of those external harddisk buyers, it doesnt matter though. They buy the complete Disk from one vendor and dont care what is inside. If they need more storage, they will buy another one. And as SATA drives get even more popular, I would guess that new internal controllers with SATA will quickly replace the previous ones in the current enclosures.

So although at the moment the majority of external enclosures still use PATA, I think this will not be a big stumbling block and they will adapt to SATA pretty quickly. Pity though, as those enclosures tend to be quite robust (at least for me) and I would like to keep them around for a quite a bit longer, as I have quite a few of them...

what about warranties?

[Anonymous Coward]

So Seagate will no longer manufacture PATA drives - however they still have plenty of drives out there with five year warranties that will still need to be supported. Should I hope that all my current drives fail before the year is up so I can still get them serviced under warranty? We still have a lot of these drives in our facility and the warranties go out as far as 2012...

Re:Time to upgrade

[Enderandrew]

"Try Ubuntu on a Core 2 Duo. You will like it."

I'd rather disembowel myself with a corkscrew than run Gnome or buy an Intel processor, thank you.

However, I'm very happy running KDE on my AMD X2 3500. It overclocks like a dream, and only cost me $59.

PC fanboys please read

[Anonymous Coward]

You're right. You shouldn't buy a Mac. In fact, please don't. If you are so utterly bereft of creative inspiration that you have no desire for the sorts of applications that only run on Macs (Coda, TextMate, Final Cut Pro, Logic, RapidWeaver, etc.), and you lack the aesthetic intuition to appreciate the elegance of the Mac's comprehensive platform architecture, then by all means keep your filthy, beancounting PC fingers to yourself.

Compaq HD interface - the original IDE

[calidoscope]

Out of curiosity, did IDE have a standard interface when it started, or did everyone adopt the most popular one?

The original 'IDE' drives were made for Compaq by Control Data (whose disk drive division is now part of Seagate), so that could be thought of as the original standard. The intent was to have something that acted a bit like a standard MFM drive + controller to allow for a simple interface to the ISA bus. The original IDE port was on Compaq's multifunction I/O card that had the FD controller, parallel port, serial port and IDE port on one card. The original drives were 'dumb' with no information on drive geometry.

The P-ATA interface uses the same physical connector as the IDE interface, but incorporated much of the SCSI command set instead of the low level disk controller command set used on the original IDE drives.

Re:Compaq HD interface - the original IDE

[dfghjk]

Don't know where your history comes from, but my recollection is that the first IDE drives came from Quantum and Conner (partly owned by Compaq), drive geometries were available from the beginning, the programming interfaces were already long established, and the electrical interface was the 16-bit ISA bus with a couple of chip selects added. Compaq didn't invent this at all. Systems shipped from other vendors as soon as drives were available. I worked at Dell at the time and had these drives before they existed in the market.

"The P-ATA interface uses the same physical connector as the IDE interface, but incorporated much of the SCSI command set instead of the low level disk controller command set used on the original IDE drives."

I have no idea what you are talking about here. IDE devices use the same command set they always have although much has been added with time. The only SCSI command set added came with ATAPI which has nothing to do with hard drives. ATAPI was not "instead of" anything, it was created to replace proprietary CD-ROM attachment schemes in order to make optical drives ubiquitous.

I had a VIA to SATA converter in my ASUS K8V SE...

[antdude]

However, I kept losing connections. I tried swapping the SATA cable, adapter, etc. It just didn't work since it would randomly disconnect my third Seagate HDD. It can be OK for weeks and months or last days or hours. See my old newsgroup thread about it. I gave up and got another motherboard and moved this old to my old box for Debian (two PATA/EIDE HDDs without any problems).

I found one: SATA/IDE to Firewire/USB/SATA

[r00t]

It's black. It says "COOLMAX" on top.

On the inside I get SATA and IDE. On the outside I get FireWire 400, fast USB, and regular SATA. (not an e-SATA connector) There is a switch on the outside to choose between SATA and the other stuff. So far I have only used the IDE and FireWire. I think that everything works with everything, but I don't promise that the SATA stuff isn't just a pass-through.

I got it as I nervously prepare for the painful transition from FireWire and IDE over to USB and SATA. This is not going to be fun or cheap at all.

Re:Time to upgrade

[thebear05]

i tried running windows on a 286 it was worse than watching paint dry and that was with a full meg of ram

55C was the highest AFAIK; I'm not going over

[r00t]

Looking around on www.silentpcreview.com, I see some people arguing for temperatures even up to about 65C.

This is drive temperature, not ambient temperature. The case is cooler. 48C or 49C is probably the norm.

I should clarify "fail". I replace drives when they start to whine or clunk. The most recent loss, a Samsung, made loud clunking noises. This was accompanied by long pauses while trying to read data. Prior to that it would whine depending on computer angle; the mounting screws weren't at all tight.

Re:55C was the highest AFAIK; I'm not going over

[Hal_Porter]

Well Seagate say a maximum drive temperature of 60C

http://www.seagate.com/support/disc/manuals/ata/10 0389997c.pdf page 12

But that might not be the whole story

From here
http://www.calce.umd.edu/whats_new/2003/1203.pdf
"Nakamura (2001) derived an activation energy of 1.27 eV for the fatigue of piggyback PZT actuators, a common wearout mechanism, which resulted in a predicted lifetime of 6.4 years when operating at 3 kHz at 25C."

Googling for the paper I can only get the abstract
http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/Xplore/login.jsp?url=/i el5/20/19818/00917646.pdf?arnumber=917646
"Summary:The experimental lifetime predictive equation for a piggyback PZT actuator was derived. A piggyback actuator is a fine actuator of a dual-stage servo system that is essential to increase the recording density of hard disk drives (HDD's). The obtained equation agrees with Arrhenius' equation."

Arrhenius's equation give a reaction rate which is exponential with temperature

http://www.sas.upenn.edu/~wwalsh/arrhenius.html

So the drive will fail faster at 60C than at 25C. You could actually work out the constants in the equation from the figures in the first link and then work out the fail time at 60C. I can convince myself to spend a few dollars on a big fan from the above graph though. This guy

http://www.silentmods.com/section2/item213/part3

says "At the temperature of 65 C the life time of hard disks is shortened two times if not more.". Looking at the Arrhenius graphs above that might well be the case.

Or if you can't fit a fan to you Mac, try to get a low power drive. Either a 5400rpm one, or even a 2.5" one and an adaptor. Since you need an adaptor anyway, you could even get a 2.5" SATA drive and a mounting kit (ideally one that acts like a big heatsink) and connect it via a PATA to SATA dongle.

Re:55C was the highest AFAIK; I'm not going over

[Anonymous Coward]

dude, you bought a mac cube, your only option is to kill yourself. and to clarify, fail==yuo.

Re:Time to upgrade

[Technician]

I'd rather disembowel myself with a corkscrew than run Gnome or buy an Intel processor, thank you.

Some poeple still swear by their Commodore 64... AMD is so last year.. If you don't like Gnome, there is Kubuntu. Unlike the Windows desktop, you have a choice.

Re:Time to upgrade

[Technician]

i tried running windows on a 286 it was worse than watching paint dry and that was with a full meg of ram

That's why in my post, I mentioned my slow system is a P III. I retired my 286 long time ago.

However when I need to burn a eprom (the old ones) I still once in a while fire up DOS and use the ISA slot burner.

Flash memory has mostly replaced the need for it along with the UV eraser.

Re:Time to upgrade

[Enderandrew]

I thought that AMD had fallen behind as well. However, my $59 processor has been known to overclock to 3.0 ghz on air alone. Intel doesn't even offer a Core series dual-core processor any where near $59. And thanks to the price drop, I think you can even get a dual-core for $35 now.

Oh, and AMD isn't currently up on antitrust charges right now.

It's OK ...

[the bluebrain]

... they've got accelerometers to protect them.

Re:Time to upgrade

[tirefire]

I'd rather disembowel myself with a corkscrew than run Gnome or buy an Intel processor, thank you.
However, I'm very happy running KDE on my AMD X2 3500. It overclocks like a dream, and only cost me $59.

With proper cooling, a Core 2 Duo e4300 like the one I have can clock to around 200% of its stock speed. Let's see your "X2 3500" do that, assuming it exists - it doesn't seem to be for sale anywhere.

SATA performance

[Anonymous Coward]

Thats a shame really seeing as in my real world tests SATA doesn't even come close to PATA on random data access.

SATA is great if you are streaming data off a drive in a linear fashion but the minute that data is spread all over the drive in little chunks the access rates drop right down, especially if you run with write caching off. Seeing as my drives get used for database applications write caching is the first thing I disable on a new drive. I have to know that when I write the data it gets written at that point and not just held in some cache somewhere.

As for SCSI, SATA doesn't even come vaguely close to SCSI, nowhere near as fast, you take a SCSI drive and a SATA drive, turn write caching off on both and run a heavy database app against both drives, I can get sub 10ms inserts and sub 1ms reads on SCSI RAID hardware, I cannot get anything close to that on SATA RAID, it's roughly a twentieth the performance, sure if I turn write caching on the performance increases slightly but the write caching is useless anyway (and dangerous), my main database has over a billion rows of data in it....

Effectively if the manufacturers drop PATA then in applications where I may have used PATA I will have to switch to SCSI to keep the performance levels up, if they drop SCSI as well I guess I am screwed until solid state disks come down in price...

Re:SATA performance

[Carewolf]

That's a feature. SCSI is cheap to implement and superior in performance. The only reason alternatives exists, is to be crappier and thereby raise the margins on SCSI hardware.

Re:SATA performance

[TheRaven64]

You shouldn't need to turn off write caching, as long as your operating system correctly implements fsync to tell the drive to flush the buffers. I'm really surprised you get worse performance for random access with SATA than PATA, since SATA implements native command queuing, enabling a drive to re-order requests to minimise the total seeking distance.

Re:Time to upgrade

[Enderandrew]

I said the AMD got to 3 gigahertz on air.

The site you linked me to did get the e4300 up to 3.5 ghz, but only after replacing the cooling system. On air, they only got it to 325 mhz on the FSB, which is 2.925 ghz. Oh, and the processor you are referring to costs TWICE what I paid.

So if I had paid twice what I had, I could have got a processor that almost overclocks as well as mine. And I would still be supporting an evil company guilty to antitrust. Oh, and NewEgg.com appears to be out of the 3500, but the 3600 is down to $55, even cheaper than what I paid for my 3500.

Nice try.

Meh.

[Anonymous Coward]

We're still in, what, the Bronze Age of computing? Maybe the Iron Age? This brittle tinkery hardware we use isn't worth keeping around for long. Call me when we start getting real power.

Re:Time to upgrade

[pe1chl]

There still exists a board that can use it: http://www.ibasetechnology.net/mb886.html

Those folks must really like ISA :-)
I am still using an older board from that series (with 3 ISA, 3 PCI and 1 AGP) that I bought in 2003 when I had lots of ISA cards but all standard systems came with only PCI. It was difficult to get (via an embedded-systems engineering company that was not equipped to sell to individuals), but works very well.
In fact, there is still a card in it that is used all day: a Boca 6-port serial card that controls all kind of external devices with proprietary protocols.

When I upgrade this, I either need to find a PCI multi-serial card (probably difficult by now) or switch to USB serial cables (inferior timing).

What do you mean ISA slots *were* available...?

[Kymermosst]

Why don't we try *are* available instead? On an RoHS-compliant Pentium 4 board at that.

Re:What do you mean ISA slots *were* available...?

[Reziac]

Oooh, thank you. A friend has some very high end audio ISA cards he uses for his work... and I've got a use for ISA myself.

Any idea what the price is on this critter? I don't see one offhand.

Re:What do you mean ISA slots *were* available...?

[Kymermosst]

Any idea what the price is on this critter? I don't see one offhand.

A quick search puts it from one place at $230.

Re:What do you mean ISA slots *were* available...?

[Reziac]

Your search got luckier than mine :) Thanks!

[cough*gasp*choke*] Well, that's better than the $340 I came up with somewhere else!

Re:What do you mean ISA slots *were* available...?

[Kymermosst]

No problem. I friended you - post a journal entry if you get this board and make it run. I'm curious, now!

Re:What do you mean ISA slots *were* available...?

[Reziac]

Am eyeing a used one ... it's really tempting :) even tho my only justification would be ISA-slot-on-P4-for-future-use-when-ISA-is-impossib le-to-find (that's all one word). I have a couple unused P4-3GHz machines as it is (one free, one built entirely from salvage) ... my everyday box is a lowly P3-550!

If I friended everyone here that I talk to regularly, I'd have a list 1000+ long! So I just use it to keep track of a very few individuals for specific purposes, and regard all my fans as reciprocal friends. So consider yourself friended. :)

BTW, love your tagline :D

Re:What do you mean ISA slots *were* available...?

[Reziac]

You made me spend a hundred bucks ;) I bought the MB800 that was on eBay (a model *with* an AGP slot, and it came with a 2.8GHz CPU) ... and it arrived on Tuesday (saved from Fedex mishandling by the seller's excellent packing job -- and the board is white-glove clean, too).

So far all I've done is hook it up to a floppy drive to make sure it boots, and all seems well. (After giving it a HSF it liked, anyway... it blew a siren at the first one I tried, didn't like the fan for some reason.) On first glance, the board seems to have a lot of nice features. The only real downside is that the 845 chipset has a 137GB IDE HD limit, tho since this is liable to be primarily my DOS games machine, that's not really much of an issue. And there are always adapter cards.

And I'll need to find it a couple of good-sized [uh, cheap/salvage] DDR sticks ... they aren't raining from the sky just yet!!

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[account_deleted]

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Obligigatory Simpson's quote:

[rts008]

Nelson: "Ha! Ha!"

Now you're bitchin' 'cause you have yer cute lil' cube, Macboy?

LOL!

Peripherals were never ISA

[macraig]

Ummm, hate to pick an oozy nit with the OP, but peripherals were never classified as "ISA" or "not ISA": nothing accurately defined as a "peripheral" would ever connect directly to the ISA bus. Only interface cards/adapters/HBAs were "ISA" (or not).

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[account_deleted]

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[account_deleted]

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SATA = IDE, SCASI = IDE, SAS = IDE...

[Anonymous Coward]

Nobody is dropping Integrated Drive Electronics from Serial ATA drives. Thank you, clueless tech journos; please all say "Parallel ATA" and type "PATA" now... if "ATA" vs "SATA" isn't clear enough for common use.

Re:Yes. Re:Does it really matter?

[fbjon]

I don't think you need 20x for a hard drive. Hard drive speeds are going pretty much nowhere. If you need SCSI, use SCSI.

Look into solid state (compactflash) replacements.

[Chonine]

There is a lot of perfectly usable hardware out there, which has the one reliability weakness with the hard drive. The latest IDE drives work great usually going back to some pretty old hardware, although you may be limited somewhat (depending on the MB and OS). The SATA drives break the compatibility, although you will probably be able to get SATA to IDE adapters for some time to come. Problem is, that will be for desktops only.

I have a small collection of some older Thinkpads. One thing that I have been using are notebook IDE (44-pin) to CompactFlash adapters. There are even some dual CF adapters available such as http://www.addonics.com/products/flash_memory_read er/ad44midecf.asp. Twenty-two bucks. Since it is IDE, the bus still has a master and a slave for it, and you can have two drives essentially in that one notebook HD slot. I think everyone is waiting for solid state drives to arrive on the scene (affordable ones), but most of those will probably be SATA. So this lets you get two 16GB CF cards into the single IDE slot on a laptop, and it runs silently. It is also cooler, weighs less, uses less power, faster access (not necessarily transfer), and they are much more reliable and rugged (the limited writes isn't as much of an issue now). It seems like a good way to patch up old hardware's Achilles' heal.

It is probably a good thing to look into for the 3.5" desktop drives too. As CF cards continue to grow and fall in price, I expect in a few years all my modern SATA equipment will be using SSDs, and my older PATA equipment will have large cheap dual compactflash cards. Some of the hardware is so slow that all I really need is a 1GB CF card to store a minimal Linux distribution on it anyways.

optical drives still almost exclusively have PATA

[Britz]

even though some mainboard chipsets don't even include PATA any more. I hope for a bigger push for optical drives to go SATA.

I might be in the wrong, but

[newr00tic]

real parallel printer ports can do things that USB printer ports can't, [...]

there's a lot of EPROM programmers out there that will only work with a standard ISA-style printer port; not even a PCI printer port card will work. This is more like the EPROM programmers being out of date, don't you think?

If they'd only keep up with the times, I'm sure interfacing through USB wouldn't really be that hard, and any extraneous "commands" not found natively in USB itself could surely be emulated on either side.

I apologize for the arrogance, but somehow things have to move on, for good or less..

Re:optical drives still almost exclusively have PA

[lattyware]

Not true. I picked up two NEC SATA DVD burners (with the full array of format support) for £20 a pop. Work great, and that was some time ago. Scan actually have a section on SATA DVD burners.

Uh-oh

[Yer Mom]

Looks like I'd better get a few spare drives in, unless TiVo are planning on releasing anything more recent than the Series 1 in the UK... (even then, the new ones don't seem to be as hackable)

Unless a SATA drive will work in a Series 1 with a SATA-PATA adaptor, I'll be screwed if the current drive goes south and there aren't any replacements available.

Why are so many complaining?

[muffen]

Don't understand why so many people are complaining about this, I doubt it will make any difference to the majority of people complaining.

If you want to connect your old IDE drive to a new computer, just buy a converter, if you can afford the computer, I'm sure you can find the extra $20 somewhere.

If your old IDE drive breaks and you need a new one, get a SATA card, it costs less than $30, so if you can afford the new drive, I doubt you will have a problem paying the extra $30.

If you want to add storage space to your existing computer and all your PCI slots are gone or you don't know how to open a computer, get a USB drive. Since you don't have a SATA connection, I doubt speed is your main concern.

Finally, if you don't have USB connections, get something like the NSLU2, you can even run Linux on it (I'm running two of those at home with Debian Etch, works really well).

I'm sure you could come up with some scenario where the IDE drive would be useful and there really isn't any other option, but for the vast majority of people complaining, there are solutions already out there that will solve the problem.

Re:Why are so many complaining?

[Anonymous Coward]

> If your old IDE drive breaks and you need a new one, get a SATA card [cooldrives.com],
> it costs less than $30, so if you can afford the new drive, I doubt you will have a
> problem paying the extra $30.

What if you don't have any open PCI slots? What about people what have a SFF with one or no PCI slots? If it has just one PCI slot it might have a tuner or capture card. These people can't just buy a SATA Card and add SATA abilities to their existing computer.

Re:Why are so many complaining?

[Anonymous Coward]

can't use adapters - have terabytes of ATA raid that will require ATA drives to replace any failed drives - we're just like the previous poster concerned about warranty status and replacing ATA drives in the years to come.

Re:Why are so many complaining?

[Anonymous Coward]

Have you ever tried using smartctl on an SATA drive? You currently can't read the smart data from these SATA drives. I have no idea if these things are about to die on me! And the performance from IDE/PATA and SATA is the same. That is why I will be sticking with PATA for the foreseeable future.

Don't even get me started on using KVM's with USB vs. PS2.

Re:Why are so many complaining?

[Anonymous Coward]

What do you mean "no idea if these things are about to die"? They come from a savagely price-competitive market and they're built out of spinning rust. They have been about to die from the moment you first spooled them up.

Gnashing of teeth

[bryan1945]

Didn't all the same type comments happen back when Apple dropped the floppy drive and legacy ports for USB?

Also, I realize the importance of serial ports for older equipment, but can't the hardware manufacturers get a little bit into the times and use something a little bit newer? Seriously, why the heck do I need some special ass cable to console into some Cisco hardware?

Re:Gnashing of teeth

[Jorophose]

That wasn't the issue.

The issue was that Apple left you "islanded". There were very little USB-flash drive based solutions available; 1999, a USB flash drive (8MiB or 16MiB I can't recall) was something like 30$-40$... Memory is foggy, but that's more or less it. And that's freaking expensive.

I will regret seeing PATA go down the drain... I've got many systems still using PATA, and I liked it. But my next system will be SATA; the SATA drive would cost less than the PATA drive, so why not? And in the rare case one of my older hard drives fail... I could always get a CompactFlash card with a PATA adapter, find an elusive PATA hard drive (I don't think they'll go overnight) or buy a SATA card like someone suggested. But, due to power issues, I don't think the card would be all that great; there's a lot of Dells out there, with only enough power to accept another PCI device.

That said, do PATA drives deteriorate if left in, say, my closet? I'm thinking of just picking up 3-4 drives, most likely 40/80GiB in size, in case my current drives fail. But they've been running for 7 years, I'm sure they could run for another 4 at least.

Re:Gnashing of teeth

[bryan1945]

"That said, do PATA drives deteriorate if left in, say, my closet?"

Not in my experience. I have some old 4GB drives that still work. Those things were built like tanks. Good for critical backups, but can be cranky at first working with new systems.

Your 40/80 drives are probably built pretty well- I (personally, no research) didn't see any dramatic decline until drives topped 100G.

SATA cables...

[RMH101]

...suck balls. Whoever designed the SATA data and power connectors should be thoroughly ashamed of themselves - they're terrible. They don't lock, they're flimsy and they break if a lateral force is applied to the cable. At least IDE's bulletproof.

Re:SATA cables...

[WhiteDragon]

Whoever designed the SATA data and power connectors should be thoroughly ashamed of themselves - they're terrible. They don't lock, they're flimsy and they break if a lateral force is applied to the cable. At least IDE's bulletproof. I have to agree with you on this one. The SATA cables in my systems are always coming undone with just the slightest touch. Also, the cables are only good for about 50 connect / disconnect cycles. At least eSATA (the external SATA connector) addresses a few of these issues. I wish more devices used it, but for now it seems like most external devices are still USB or FireWire.

Re:SATA cables...

[couchslug]

Yes they do. I apply a blob of clear RTV to secure them, but shouldn't have to.
Too bad they aren't more like RJ-45 connectors.

Re:SATA cables...

[Emetophobe]

You can buy sata data cables with a locking mechanism. http://www.ncix.com/products/index.php?mode=produc treviewread&product_id=20770&review=14

I'd agree with your point though, I've had drive issues a couple times just because a sata data cable came loose.

Re:SATA cables...

[Anonymous Coward]

You don't technically need "cables". The ports on each drive are in the same place... so with the right enclosure, you can just slide the drive in and it will mate with the ports in the enclosure. Not many companies do this type of enclosure though...

Re:SATA cables...

[RMH101]

worst case I've seen (and admittedly some of it was down to my hamfistedness) involved an expensive WD raptor drive in an expensive Antec 900 case. Due to the motherboard position, it was a really tight fit to get the SATA plug in. One slip and some lateral force (not much, but evidently enough) got applied to the inserted SATA plug. Result? Snapped the 2mm thick plastic SATA socket surround off the WD drive. Completely ruined the drive until I hotglued the plug in: which isn't exactly ideal for a RAID 0 system! Not my finest moment...

I'm still with IDE

[rAiNsT0rm]

I have been a system builder for over 12 years, and my home PC still happily runs IDE drives. Why? because of the low overhead. SATA is rarely faster and the CPU usage is much higher. I build my personal systems to waste as few clock cycles and be as in sync as possible between CPU, memory, and FSB. People are always amazed at how my "older" systems beat the hell out of their newer ones that have no regard to tight timings and tons of wasted cycles.

Just because you can buy any CPU, MB, and supported RAM doesn;t mean you are building an efficient system... and that is a (sadly) lost art in the rigs people build today. Add to that the complete stupidity of some of the "Overclockers" and their complete lack of understanding in this area and you have so much misinformation online it is just silly.

If your CPU is waiting more than it is hitting then you can have all the Uber leet gear in the world and my "poor" box with IDE drives will still smoke it.

Re:I'm still with IDE

[spiderbitendeath]

Completely agree with you on that. My friends are always amazed how my dual Pentium 3 server runs so great, and can out perform their newer setups. I've got it running as my desktop, plus ftp, mail, ssh, mysql, and apache. It runs smooth as can be. It's been running since 1998 as my main system without giving me any trouble. I've tried repeatedly to help people build servers and desktops that would run great, but they only ever want to go with what has the fanciest name. My last desktop system I built, Pentium D 920, wiped the floor with my brother's Athlon X2. My current system, a Pentium 4 2.66ghz Socket 478 system, keeps up with my friends Core 2 in most everything, except graphics horse power. I miss the days where people actually knew how to work on computers and build them. I'm constantly losing sleep trying to repair systems for people around here.

Re:I'm still with IDE

[rAiNsT0rm]

Honestly I think we are probably the only two people who still understand the fundamentals.

Just because a certain CPU is the fastest in it's class and the RAM I'm using is also, doesn;t mean they are in sync... add to that the RAM timings and you can be wasting 10-20% of your CPU's speed. So if your Uber CPU is 20% faster than mine on paper, our systems end up being 100% equal and many times the slower one becomes faster.

I really wish some hardware site would actually take the time to highlight this instead of making people believe that all you have to do is OC your CPU to the max and then try to eek out the lowest timings possible from your RAM to build a "fast" system. It drives me crazy.

Apple isn't even immune to it with their new C2D Macbook Pro's. Only one of them is in sync between the processor and RAM. It amazes me.

Re:I'm still with IDE

[spiderbitendeath]

As a species going extinct, we should petition for special protections. heh

Re:I'm still with IDE

[Anonymous Coward]

You must have a lot of fun fighting all those bulky ribbon cables every time you open your case.

Buy'em

[kahrytan]

Do you hear what I hear? Cha-Ching for SATA to IDE adapter sellers.

They're still going to make magnetic media?

[CarpetShark]

Exactly. Good riddance. It's not as though these things are in high demand.

Yep. When I first read the title, "Seagate to Drop IDE Drives...", I was thinking of "IDE drive" as a generic term for a moment, and hoping they were dropping magnetic media in favour of solid state or something.

This is essentially just moving to a more modern interface. Wake me up when they move to holograms.

Sources?????

[russ1337]

The Arstechnica article has this:

The Inquirer (via various channel sources) first reported the move, and a Seagate spokesperson told Ars that the report was "probably" true.

So there seems to be some doubt about the article. When you visit the Ars link to the Inquirer, there are no references whatsoever beyond "Chanel sources". The only other news article I can find links back to the Inquirer.

I think I'd need to see a press release from Seagate before this gets any more of my attention.

No more IDE?

[WoLpH]

So... they're going to sell SCSI only?

When will people learn that SATA is also IDE...

Re:No more IDE?

[Nimey]

Haven't you heard? They're bringing back ESDI in a serial form.

they should get rid of all the seagates

[v1]

Eight years ago everyone that wanted a quality drive sprung for the extra cash to get a quality drive, a Seagate. If you had a budget, you got a quantum. If it really didn't matter and you had good backups, a Western Digital or Maxtor.

NOW. Good lord what happened? Seagates are now some of the cheapest HDs on the market, both in price and reliability. I have replaced 2x as many failed seagates where I work lately than all other models of HD combined. They just die, suddenly and catastrophically, often times only a couple weeks after being installed. And it's not the sort of thing you can recover, they either head crash or just start chirping. A very expensive vacation to DriveSavers or Total Recall is the only way to save those. We went through four 80gb seagates at work, at roughly two week intervals, until I said ENOUGH and we replaced it with a WD. Sick and tired of doing Seagate RMAs and rebuilding drives.

Western Digital OTOH, seems to be a respectable and reliable brand now. It's like WD and Seagate switched places.

I was on the "teetering edge" on not using seagate anymore three months ago when I needed to expand here. I bougt a pair of seagate sata 500's, copied the data off the collection of smaller drives, and sat on them. I have a cron script that runs weekly doing full surface scans on all my drives, (over a dozen) and so far it has tagged a failing drive every single time while it was minor, and I have never lost a byte, so for this less important data I didn't think a backup was justified. Three weeks ago I judged the migration done and started repurposing the smaller drives.

Naturally, one week later one of the 500's suffered a head crash. I could hear the drive from OUTSIDE MY HOUSE before I put the key in the door I knew something was seriously wrong. Two month old %@# drive. Christ.

So now I have recovered what I can and bought several large cheap 1TB drives to serve as backups. Maxtors I might add. There's another brand that five years ago I would not have touched with a pole. But right now there is no brand I trust less than Seagate.

Now what can I do? Take it back and exchange it for another seagate? Wonderful.... just... wonderful. Anyone want a 500gb seagate? still in the antistatic?

Re:they should get rid of all the seagates

[Creepy Crawler]

---Wonderful.... just... wonderful. Anyone want a 500gb seagate? still in the antistatic?

Put it to good use and donate it to that K-Tec blender guy on YouTube.

They sponsor a "Will it blend"... see how a HD blends ;-)

Re:they should get rid of all the seagates

[neoprint]

You DO realise Maxtor is owned by Seagate, right?

Re:they should get rid of all the seagates

[Abcd1234]

Meh, I have a pair of 160GB SATA Seagate Barracudas in a mirror as part of an LVM on my Myth box and they've been running smooth since last November, having been beaten up extensively (easily handling two simultaneous recordings while playing back a third). I've also got a pair of Seagate 160GB PATA drives in my desktop machine, also mirrored, one of which has been running for years now, while the Maxtor which was originally paired in the mirror (I prefer to mix drives/batches when I can) died long ago, to be replaced by the second Seagate.

So, as with all things related to hard-drives... YMMV. *shrug* IMHO, drives are far more likely to fail due to thermal issues, problems in specific batches, etc, than because a specific manufacturer is bad.

Re:they should get rid of all the seagates

[v1]

Yes they are owned but apparently not yet infected. I've seen it go both ways when one manufacturer bought another. Look at quantum. Quantum Fireballs were another brand that used to be well-respected until they were bought. Sadly, the drive designs were merged and both brands were the worse for it. I lost count of the number of deathstars that died a chirping death. We had a whole box full at work. Finally got some coin from them after a class action but had to sit on them for quite some time for it to happen.

But at this point WD is (sadly) the brand I trust the most. I have had good luck in the past with simply going with high quality drives and keeping a really close eye on them, but this burned me good. Now I will continue with the careful monitoring, and mirror or sync everything. The 1TB maxtors were $330 each here, well worth it I believe. I just think it's sad that one can't even have a reasonable expectation that their information is safe on a HD anymore. Yes backups are a good idea, but shouldn't be getting called on with such frequency, and catastrophic failures should be much less common than soft errors. I can deal with IO errors, that's just a matter of "get a replacement NOW and get the data off before it changes its mind", but when you come home and it sounds like a circular saw is running in the basement, you're SOL. I can understand an io error being a quality or age issue, but when a head crashes or a spindle motor tanks a bearing 2 months out of the box there is a serious quality control problem. That's like your brand new car throwing a rod a week after you drive it off the lot.

Or, it's the difference between "my car won't start" and "my car just blew up". One is acceptable to happen from time to time, the other is not. At least not with a brand new product.

Re:they should get rid of all the seagates

[v1]

I'd probably go for that except I paid $150 ea for those two drives. I don't think they'll let me RMA it post-blend.

Though it would almost be worth it to write a letter to them to get the OK to send it in a zip-loc.

I can't tell if it's a head crash or a spindle motor failure. I DO have two identical drives and have the data off the good one, so I suppose I could get dicey and try to swap platters and maybe get real lucky if it's the motor, but I don't know how well that would work out. I'm remodeling my clean room y'know.

Re:they should get rid of all the seagates

[Creepy Crawler]

---I don't think they'll let me RMA it post-blend.

It'd still be a heck of a lot of laughs to see if they would accept it back.

---I can't tell if it's a head crash or a spindle motor failure. I DO have two identical drives and have the data off the good one, so I suppose I could get dicey and try to swap platters and maybe get real lucky if it's the motor, but I don't know how well that would work out. I'm remodeling my clean room y'know.

Well.. I'd just pay a corp to come back and harvest the data. Spindle mounting and generally hd repair is rather nasty, and can easily kill drives. And worse comes to worst, they can use a electron microscope if its that critical.

Re:they should get rid of all the seagates

[Reziac]

Seagates, or Maxtors in Seagate clothing? You describe a typical Maxtor death -- sudden and with no warning. And remember who now owns Maxtor. (I've personally seen Maxtors rebadged as Seagates, just as Seagate did with Conner HDs when they absorbed Conner, some years back.)

Conversely, I've never had a W.D. die without giving me plenty of warning; and even after getting sick, they'll stagger along for quite some time before dying entirely.

Re:they should get rid of all the seagates

[bored_engineer]

sure. 500 GB is more space than I have on my home fileserver.

Speaking of that file server, I had no end of trouble with the durn thing when I was first setting it up; I lost six (seagate) drives in a four drive RAID array. Well, I finally hit myself on the head with a clue stick, changed the SATA card, and it's been running perfectly since. I don't claim that this will cure your ails, but it might be something to think about.

Re:they should get rid of all the seagates

[v1]

No, this drive sounds like a power drill from outside the house. Not an interface card problem. ;)

Re:they should get rid of all the seagates

[v1]

whatever the story, best buy let me return the failed drive today for store credit. At least they didn't force me to take another seagate in exchange.

Re:they should get rid of all the seagates

[Reziac]

Ah, that's good -- beats doing an RMA where you *know* you're getting another of the same model, however unsatisfactory it may be...

I've never particularly liked Seagates myself -- for the most part they're durable enough (if they live past infancy, they usually go forever), but they run hot, are fairly noisy, and are noticeably slower than comparable drives (small cache? dunno for sure) despite equivalent specs.

Windows has a minor problem with SATA

[master_p]

Windows has a problem with SATA: if the data on the SATA disk exceed 137 GB, the message 'write delayed failed' appears, and the data are lost.

Searching around to see who's got the same problem on Windows XP + SP4, I found out that it's a common problem for Windows not yet solved by Microsoft.

IDE disks do not have such a problem. I was thinking of buying IDE disks instead of SATA, but seeing that companies will drop IDE, it's not a very good long term investment.

Re:Windows has a minor problem with SATA

[andrewd18]

Windows XP + SP4

Stop endangering the timeline!

Re:Windows has a minor problem with SATA

[Anonymous Coward]

that has to do with LBA, or logical block adressing http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logical_block_address ing wiki.org

get a patch from your drive manufacturer, and all will be fine...might have to format though....

Re:Windows has a minor problem with SATA

[Vulva R. Thompson, P]

FYI, here's a deep link to a good site for LBA info:

http://www.48bitlba.com/issues.htm

Specifically, the SATA concern is towards the bottom of the page.

Re:Windows has a minor problem with SATA

[crabpeople]

Delayed write fail means there is either a problem with your drive, OS patches (windows 2000 has an issue prior to sp4 iirc), the bios on the motherboard, or the SATA controller drivers. I have multiple 500 gb sata drives in windows 2k that all work fine.

Re:Windows has a minor problem with SATA

[master_p]

I have 2 SATA drives and they both have problems. I also have SP2 (erroneously written SP4 above) for Windows XP. I have done all the updates possible, but the problem persists. The BIOS has nothing to do with it, Windows does not use the BIOS.

I have seen others having this problem with no fix in sight.

You insensitive clod

[Prototerm]

I watch all my old movies on Laser Disc. I think it's a terrific improvement over my old BetaMax machine!

So what's next?

[Anonymous Coward]

I wonder how long it will be until serial ports are eliminated... that would suck, seeing as how I use them almost every day.

Optical drives? Replacements?

[innatetech]

It's still unusual to see CD and DVD drives that use anything other than PATA. There's also a large base of installed IDE drives. A *very* large base. There will continue to be a market for replacement equipment for some time.

Re:Yes. Re:Does it really matter?

[afidel]

You know that modern SCSI drives have almost NO differences with SATA right? SAS(serial attached SCSI) is a simple superset of SATA. The primary difference has to do with how they work in large arrays with multiple switches. The problem with parallel cables is that at speeds over about 3Gb/s syncing the multiple drive lines was almost impossible and required lots of power and expensive silicone.

Why even have SATA?

[Ngarrang]

USB and FireWire are pretty fast, and getting faster. They could be used internally for all of the drives quite easily. And as a plus, their cables are smaller.

Re:Why even have SATA?

[Yosho]

Because USB and FireWire are still incredibly slow compared to SATA. FireWire 800 is rated at 786.432 Mbps; "Hi-Speed" USB 2.0 trails behind at 480 Mbps. On the other hand, currently available SATA devices run at 3 Gbps. You could use USB and FireWire for internal devices, but the performance would be painful, at best. It's not like SATA is stagnant, either -- a 6 Gbps standard is in the works.

Re:Why even have SATA?

[Anonymous Coward]

Because USB sucks as an interface for hard drives

1. It interrupts your system every millisecond, just to see if work is there.
2. It doesn't stream data, every packet requires an ack.
3. USB 2.0 (480Mbs) can't achieve the throughput that Firewire 400 can for these reasons.

Re:Why even have SATA?

[Ngarrang]

Because USB and FireWire are still incredibly slow compared to SATA. FireWire 800 is rated at 786.432 Mbps; "Hi-Speed" USB 2.0 trails behind at 480 Mbps. On the other hand, currently available SATA devices run at 3 Gbps. You could use USB and FireWire for internal devices, but the performance would be painful, at best. It's not like SATA is stagnant, either -- a 6 Gbps standard is in the works. But at the current spin rates of hard drives (7200RPM for most users), they cannot even transfer at 3 Gbps. Transfer rates like that sound great on paper, but they aren't transferring to real-world use for most people. If you have an array, sure, you will reach the 3 Gbps max rate (or is that a burst rate being quoted?). In the typical PC being sold to home users, and even the typical business workstation (which tend to be simpler than many home PCs), FireWire would be all that is needed for the drives.

Re:Why even have SATA?

[toddestan]

Apple shipped some G4 series PowerMacs with internal firewire ports. Presumably for a harddrive. While nothing seems to have ever come out of it, there is evidence that they atleast toyed with the idea.

You know

[Ravenscall]

Some of us have perfectly functioning older hardware that we have no wish to upgrade for whatever reason. Newer =/= better. Case in point, I am about to dig out a USB to PS/2 adaptor because my motherboard does not like to detect my trackball on boot. If I plug it into the PS/2 port, I KNOW it will be detected and working at boot. I also have no reason to dump my lasernet 5P, and really do not care to get a parallel to USB adaptor just so I can have yet another dodgy interface.

Re:Look into solid state (compactflash) replacemen

[innatetech]

In my routers, I'm currently using 8GB CF cards on Addonics CF/SATA adapters, usually soft- or fakeraided. I typically put /var , /tmp and swap on pendrives, just to protect the CF cards a little. This works very, very well. The future is now.

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

NE2000 JVEC boards

[tinkerghost]

LOL, 5 years ago I bought a box of boards at a tag sale - got 3 PCI JVEC NE2000 clones w/ Cat5 & Coax support. I know they are at least 10 years old & they still run just fine :) Up until FC5 they were auto detected by Fedora - still recognized by Ubuntu.

Right now I'm running one as the connection between my firewall & the DSL modem w/ the onboard NIC connecting to the 100/1G switch LANside. I don't see that changing in the near future. As it is I have a hard time saturating the DSL connection. Even switching to cable, I won't max the card. I might have to upgrade if I go FIOS when they offer it to me - in oh say 5 years.

One word summary: Bullshit.

[Arimus]

Err.... aren't SATA drives still IDE drives? SATA and PATA are both attachement technologies which use drives containing integrated drive electronics.

So unless Samsung are pulling out of the either ATA market place they will still be making IDE drives.

My NAS is limited by the network not the drive

[gelfling]

So thanks for forcing me to buy a much more expensive SATA NAS that won't run any faster at all. Tell you what - make a solid state SATA plugin device then we'll talk.

Re:Yes. Re:Does it really matter?

[Lord of Hyphens]

...required lots of power and expensive silicone. You've been giving your hard drives breast implants?

Only if

[Ahnteis]

Only if you add suspenders.

Bullshit

[Agarax]

I call bullshit.

No one that posts on slashdot would know what teen pussy feels like.

Because I need more IDE drives...

[DarthVain]

Meh. I bought a new motherboard from my new computer and it has ONE IDE slot. ONE. Thats including the DVD. That leaves me one slave IDE off of that and I am out. I currently have like 5 IDE drives and one SATA drive. So unless I want to use a PCI slot and buy an add on card to give me more IDE slots, I can't use them in that computer anyway (I just run them in my older computers for now).

So in short thats all I need is more IDE drives... big whoop.

Actually the bigger kick in the nuts

[Sycraft-fu]

Is the motherboard makers. Intel's new board based on their P35 lacks connectors for PS/2 and floppy. They made the concession on IDE, since as you noted people still won't get off their ass and make SATA optical drives (the Plextor SA-755 I got was the only one I could find and it wasn't cheap) but the others are gone.

That is really going to help a lot as manufacturers that buy those boards simply aren't going to have a choice. No, you can't include a PS/2 keyboard because it is 1/2 of 1 cent cheaper, get a USB one.

I think that's where the change will really come from. As the mobo companies, and in particular the companies that make chipsets for mobos push towards no legacy connectors, the industry will have no choice but to update or face devices they can't sell.

Re:Actually the bigger kick in the nuts

[Khaed]

Newegg has SATA optical drives...

Re:Actually the bigger kick in the nuts

[blackicye]

Is the motherboard makers. Intel's new board based on their P35 lacks connectors for PS/2 and floppy.

Actually some still do.
The ABIT IP-35 and Microstar's new P35 boards both have PS/2 Ports, a single IDE channel, and a floppy channel.

I just assembled 350 of these for a preliminary leg of the WCG

Drop them good

[Anonymous Coward]

"Seagate to Drop IDE Drives by Year End"

About time they make that crash test.

Boot from USB or something

[wsanders]

If your Mobo is only 5 yrs old, it can probably boot from USB.

Or buy a PATA drive now and use it later, they only cost 20% more than a SATA drive. I just upgraded my way-too-small PATA drive to a 250 MB one, for less than $130.

Not to give a smart-ass answer, but maybe your fanless system does heat up your disk and cause it to fail sooner than it has to. You can run a larger, 12 volt fan at 5V, and it is pretty quiet.

Re:Boot from USB or something

[Corporate Troll]

What fanless system? I don't have a fanless system?!? Confusing me with someone else?

I know plenty of motherboards that are 5 years old that can't boot from USB. For example my Tyan Tiger MPX.

They already are

[Sycraft-fu]

As I noted in another post, look at Intel's offering based on their P35 chipset. (http://www.intel.com/products/motherboard/DP35DP/ index.htm) You will notice it lacks PS/2 and floppy. This isn't some speciality motherboard either, this is their main line performance desktop board. You are correct that it's still got an IDE connector because of optical drives, but it is getting away from most legacy crap.

It's taking longer than it should for this stuff to die, but it is dying.

Oh as for floppies, one of the reasons was Windows XP RAID drivers. XP will ONLY allow driver disks to be on floppy. Rather annoying, though a USB floppy does the trick nicely. Vista is now not so encumbered (floppy, USB stick, CD, or DVD are all fine for it) and thus there's not really such a need for floppies.

It won't fit...

[Anonymous Coward]

The converter won't fit in my PS2/XBox/(insert_custom_ide_using_hardware_name).. . :(

It'll be quite awhile

[Sycraft-fu]

The big problem is that most cards aren't chomping at the bit for more bandwidth and 1x doesn't offer much more anyhow. There was good reason to get off ISA as it was extremely low bandwidth, but even it stuck around for a long time. PCI is really fine for most things. Graphics are the big thing that need more and, well that's why there's the 16x slot(s). RAID and network can also use more, but again 1x doesn't cut it, you need 4x-8x depending on. For everything else, there's no big reason to switch.

We are starting to see products come out for it. Creative has a PCIe soundcard coming, for example. It'll be a slow process though. Manufacturers won't start switching whole hog until any computer their device might target has PCIe. This means probably 4-6 years after all motherboards being sold have PCIe on them. Once that happens PCI will start dying off as people don't need it for legacy devices. Going to be quite awhile though.

Re:Time to upgrade

[couchslug]

"I still have a P III system running Windows 98 because it runs my GPS map software, has real serial ports for the GPS, and runs the piano tutor sofware using the MPU-401 port. When it's drive dies, it will be time to shop for a machine with the required hardware."

It's easy enough to accumulate plenty of spares BEFORE your hardware fails. People routinely give PIII-era stuff away or sell it dirt cheap. Many geek forums have a section for freebies or post them in their classified sections.

Plenty of SATA ones

[Sycraft-fu]

I've got a SATA enclosure. Cost me about $25 at a local shop, wasn't hard to find at all. As a bonus, it has an eSATA port. So if I get a new board that supports it, I can hook it up via SATA at full speed rather than via USB.

SATA is a broken protocol though

[Anonymous Coward]

I've always wondered why my Plextor SATA DVD burner (16x) cannot burn faster than 2x.
I'm told the SATA command set has a number of issues in general. One is that it really isn't accommodating to optical drives.

Secondly, I'm told SATA2 isn't really backward compatible with SATA1 as some of the command fields shifted!!
Notably, Seagate SATA300 drives (i.e. all new Seagate drives) have this little jumper to supposedly drop to SATA150 speeds for use on older chipsets (e.g. VIA 8237).

Problem is they flake out on this setting. I didn't believe my coworkers and tried it myself. Sure the 750 GB drive booted up OK and mounted, but after copying large files to it and diffing them I noticed lots of random file corruption. After buying a modern SATA 300 controller, the same drive works fine.

Meanwhile, IDE just works. ;-)

Re:Look into solid state (compactflash) replacemen

[jetmarc]

> The SATA drives break the compatibility, although you will probably
> be able to get SATA to IDE adapters for some time to come.

Probably this Seagate news goes hand-in-hand with another news that didn't make it to Slashdot yet:

CompactFlash is going to have SATA compatibility built-in! (german news item).

Re:Time to upgrade

[Technician]

Oh, and AMD isn't currently up on antitrust charges right now.

I like your wording.. Like they are clean as a whistle. They are the ones suing. They are the ones dumping on the market even though their cost to produce is higher. Isn't that illegal? Nobody pressed charges simply because econnomic forces will end the price war as AMD runs out of money to sell below cost to capture market share.

Intel as the economy of scale. They can and do sell at a profit at prices compeditors are unable to match as they have the hottest chips at the moment, have manufacturing capacity and effeciency to keep costs down. Part of Intel's winning the market is low defect counts so they have to throw away very little dead product. AMD went into the red with their under-pricing market dumping and cried foul.

Intel is not dumping on the market at a loss to make up market share. They didn't do it when AMD had the leading products against the Pentium 4 line.

Again, AMD does not have a clean shop in this Intel Anti-trust suit. Next time label it properly.

AMD - Intel Anti-trust...

Re:Time to upgrade

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh, and AMD isn't currently up on antitrust charges right now.

The RIAA should use this wording in the PR campaign.

The RIAA isn't currently up on piracy charges right now... Good one.

ugh

[annex1]

I get so tired of hearing these arguments.

If computers still cost ~$1000 for even a basic machine, then I could understand some real complaining, but nowadays you can buy one from Walmart for something in the neighbourhood of around $400. That's a substantial difference.

If you don't want to upgrade, then don't. Plain and simple, but don't complain when you get left behind. Our science will continue to provide us new tools to work with and those who won't accept that upgrade path, well, those people still run Win98SE or OS9 or some other legacy system. Tough luck, you said no to upgrades.

And the money argument doesn't carry much weight either, unfortunately, because when you factor in what the average North American (for the sake of example), spends every year of just Coffee, then you will start to see how spending a few hundred to get a new PC, isn't that much money. Let's do some quick math. $500 / 12months = $41.67 So, for just less than $42/month, you can have a new PC. I make a really shitty wage and only get 21 hours of work a week and even I can save $42 a month. A single PC/Console game in most modern cases, costs on average of around $50 and people manage to buy those en masse.

Keep up or get off the grid and find a nice horse and carriage.

Seagate = Maxtor, Maxtor still making IDE

[rtechie]

The subject say it all. This is consistent with Seagate's moves to make the "Seagate" brand for professionals and "Maxtor" for consumers. IDE is seen as a "consumer" item now, so it has been relegated to the less-prestigious Maxtor brand. That's it. Expect to see Maxtor making IDE drives for another 2 years.

And even if they stop, there are small SATA to IDE bridges available for about $20 which should work just about everywhere when space isn't a problem. Laptops might have issues, but I suspect 2.5" IDE dives will stay fround for a while for this reason.

This has happened in the past people. Remember MFM?

good thing

[wikinerd]

This would lead to further adoption of SATA. I really can't wait to see these bulky ribbon cables coming to extinction. I have no IDE drives personally, even the external ones are SATA. It would be good if the cable was more stable, but even with this issue the thin SATA cables are much better than the huge ribbon parallel beasts.

Some SATA supports HOT PLUG

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't remember any PATA drives supporting hot plug. This is one area where SATA excels.

ISA FTW

[Kuvter]

I just got a new laptop and my 8 button mouse has found a new home. I had left my laptop at a friend's house after a LAN party. I forgot that I had done that and invited someone over to watch a movie. My PS2 (Gen 1) had died so all I was left with was my computer and a 19' monitor to watch the movie on. I found an old ISA mouse laying around in the catacombs of my house, probably something we use on the Tandy with a 12" floppy drive way back in the day. I threw that thing on there, it took 3 minutes to recognize the mouse, but it still worked. YAY. My night was saved.

Re:Time to upgrade

[Enderandrew]

AMD's crime is selling cheap?

Intel's crime is demanding that retailers not carry AMD, or they will hold off on shipping product that you've paid for. If that isn't the most obvious form of anti-trust, I don't know what is. I can't seriously believe anyone with half a brain on /. would attempt to defend this unless they were trying to troll.

PCI card

[pavon]

Erg. I've had all sorts of problems with those USB-Serial dongles. I've tried a couple manufacturers, although they probably all use the same chipset/drivers. If this is for a desktop I would definitely go with a PCI Serial/Parallel card over a USB adapter. Those are rock solid, work on linux and windows, and aren't going away anytime soon.

Re:Time to upgrade

[Technician]

Intel's crime is demanding that retailers not carry AMD, or they will hold off on shipping product that you've paid for.

Is this any more of a crime than Coke VS Pepsi? Many fast food places carry only Coke or Pepsi products just like many retailers cary only AMD or Intel for the same reason. MS is still getting away with it. Go anyplace manufacturing MS PC's and try to either get a naked PC or one with another OS on it.

Only recently are there some manufactures crossing the bridge and paying a higher price because they refused to update the system manufacture lisence for MS only. This is nothing new. Only those with lots of weight carry Coke and Pepsi such as AM/PM and 7-11. Burger King isn't big enough yet to offer both products.

Re:Time to upgrade

[Enderandrew]

Actually yes it is a crime. If Pepsi owns Taco Bell, and they want to only sell Pepsi products, that is their prerogative.

However, if Pepsi went to a major grocery chain and said, "even though you've already given us money and purchased product from us, we're going to refuse to actually give you that Pepsi product unless you refuse to carry Coke products."

That is very much illegal. I'd advise you to brush up on antitrust laws.

Re:Time to upgrade

[Technician]

However, if Pepsi went to a major grocery chain and said, "even though you've already given us money and purchased product from us, we're going to refuse to actually give you that Pepsi product unless you refuse to carry Coke products."

Oh, I didn't realise Coke owned Burger King.

USB Hubs get you more ports, of course

[billstewart]

Ok, you've only got 4 USB ports. But hubs are cheap, and get you all the expansion you're likely to need, and even powered hubs are pretty cheap, though they're a bit more annoying.
(And a powered hub that's not plugged into a computer looks a lot like an iPod charger :-)

Actually the kids get the old PCs...

[billstewart]

In my case, I don't have kids, and I replace my home computers seldom enough that new motherboards probably don't fit and the old computers mostly end up under the desk somewhere because they're not good garage-sale fodder :-)... But for normal people, if they've got kids, that's what happens to the old computers. If their kids are older, sometimes it's the kids who get the new gamer-class computer and the adults get the kids' leftovers, but usually not.