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
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.
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.
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.
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.
Your proposal is acceptable.
"I've got more toys than Teruhisa Kitahara."
The PS/2 ports are to make it so you can accidentally put the mouse in the keyboard port, and the keyboard in the mouse port(wow, great design there guys).
Having USB ports for the mouse & keyboard would take the fun out of that!
Huh, the numlock light is on, but nothing's working.
What will I do when my drive dies again?
Well, you shouldn't have bought Maxtor drives to begin with.
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;
Comment removed based on user account deletion
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.
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.
I have a very old Fujitsu keyboard with excellent key layout and feel. It has an AT connector which I now plug into an AT-to-PS2 adapter which plugs into a PS2-to-USB adapter which finally plugs into my new Shuttle XPC that does not have a PS2 port. The absence of legacy ports on the Shuttle was one of the many reasons I bought it.
I expect that someone will have to pry my old Fujitsu keyboard from my cold dead fingers, and by then the list of adapters will be longer.
And finally, yes, all my storage devices in the Shuttle use SATA connectors.
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