Slashdot Mirror
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.
Open Source Java Web Forum with LDAP authentication
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?
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.
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.
They're a bunch of SASies.
PC Joe won't understand SCSI isn't old enough.
Ask me about repetitive DNA
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
Comment removed based on user account deletion
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.
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.
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.
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