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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."
Dropping hard drives can really damage them.
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.
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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.
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?
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.
I don't respond to AC's.
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.
The tech industry as a whole deprecates and wastes so much. It is a wasteful nightmare.
does this mean if I use IDE I can grow a beard now?
Bite my shiny metal ass.
You an still have fun with an ARM breadboard kit, though :-)
Do you even lift?
These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.
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.
They're a bunch of SASies.
PC Joe won't understand SCSI isn't old enough.
Ask me about repetitive DNA
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)
"Hey Gary, why are we wearing bras on our heads?"
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.
Quattuor res in hoc mundo sanctae sunt: libri, liberi, libertas et liberalitas.
You can pry my Novell NE2000 board, Sound Blaster Pro, Cirrus Super VGA card, and Promise LBA Extender from my cold, electrocuted hands.
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.
Life was hell, then I discovered Linux...
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.
Weaselmancer
rediculous.
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.
You can have my Model M keyboard when you pry it from my cold dead fingers....
No sig today...
Yes. And you can stop showering.
What?
shit. can I get a hand? what the hell are you all doing sitting around letting me make myself look stupid?
bastards.
Please stop stalking me, bro.
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.
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.
Gnome: A never ending quest to make unix friendly to people who don't want unix and excruciating for those that do.
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.
A Shadeless room is a brighter room.
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.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
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
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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.
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.
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.
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).
I second that.
/. , 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.
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
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.
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.
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 :)
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.
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).
So... they're going to sell SCSI only?
When will people learn that SATA is also IDE...
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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.
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.
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;
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.
Manuals are your last resort only
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.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
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?