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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."
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.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
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?
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.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
Ask me about repetitive DNA
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.
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.
...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.