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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."
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.
http://sewelldirect.com/SerialATAtoIDEConverter.as p
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.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Hah - I can answer both of these.
a phics_performance_with_galaxy_geforce_7300gt/index .html
i ng/index.html
s _scaling_analysis/
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_gr
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_com
Newer article - X1900XTX, 8800GTS
http://www.tomshardware.com/2007/03/27/pci_expres
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.
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.
Centralization breaks the internet.
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.
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.
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.
http://blindscribblings.com - Tasty pop-culture in conceptual fashion.
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.
Dropping both PS/2 ports would give you just about enough room for 4 additional USB ports.
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?
Kid-proof tablet..
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.
Why would you change though? Bioses are only used for booting these days
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
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:
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.
echo -e 'global _start\n _start:\n mov eax, 2\n int 80h\n jmp _start' > a.asm; nasm a.asm -f elf; ld a.o -o a;
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.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
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.
PATA has nothing going for it.
True confidence comes not from realising you are as good as your peers, but that your peers are as bad as you are.
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).
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.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
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.
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.
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.
I read the internet for the articles.
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.
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!
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?