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Seagate to Drop IDE Drives by Year End

Posted by samzenpus on from the you-are-finished dept.

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."

8 of 566 comments (clear)

  1. Re:but the motherboards! by CastrTroy · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.
  2. Re:When will old PCI die? by tdelaney · · Score: 4, Informative

    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.

  3. Re:What about osdev? by AnyoneEB · · Score: 4, Informative

    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.
  4. Re:What about osdev? by Hal_Porter · · Score: 4, Informative

    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.

    --
    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;
  5. Re:What about osdev? by OrangeTide · · Score: 3, Informative

    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
  6. Re:Does it really matter? by fbjon · · Score: 3, Informative

    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.

    --
    True confidence comes not from realising you are as good as your peers, but that your peers are as bad as you are.
  7. Re:PS2 keyboards by afidel · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.
  8. Windows has a minor problem with SATA by master_p · · Score: 3, Informative

    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.