Seagate Hard Drive News

[GhostShip]

I know many of you have taken care of your hard-drives over the years and maybe are thinking "old trusty" needs a well earned rest, if so it may be time to make a purchase sooner rather than later.

http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20070725-seagate-plans-to-stop-manufacturing-ide-drives-by-the-end-of-2007.html

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 as SATA continues to sap PATA's market share. According to a report published at Australian-based ITNews last January, SATA now accounts for 66.7 percent of desktop hard drive sales, 44 percent of laptop sales, and an unspecified (but increasing) amount of enterprise storage connectivity.

That's not to say support for the 21-year-old PATA standard is going to vanish overnight; 34 percent of global hard drives is still an awful lot of hardware, and quite a few CD/DVD drives still rely on PATA. This means that most motherboard manufacturers will probably keep at least one PATA slot around for awhile longer, similar to how ISA slots were available long after most of us had ditched our old ISA peripherals.

Being an owner of more than a single machine its fundemantal changes as mentioned above that can see you having to update whole rafts of your hardware come maintenance time, lets hope the older interfaces are supported for some time yet as it would be a shame to have to purchase a new motherboard to get SATA support which of course also involves changing the Ram and Processor.

There are PCI cards available for adding SATA drives to older machines but the ones I viewed only operated with the SATA drives in the secondary drive state.

My advice is to keep in contact with your hardware suppliers and make sure you have adequate warning before supplies dry up.

[Maxe]

There's a small interface card available that just plugs into the PATA port on the motherboard and converts it to SATA 150. It also requires a power connector to it: most use a floppy drive type one. Costs anywhere between £10 and £20.

[Bearded Blunder]

there are pci cards that support boot & RAID functions out there too.. you just have to read the specifications carefully

[Le Wombat]

I'm Afraid BB It's A Case Of The Old Saying...........

State Of The Art Is The Computer You Bought Today

Obsolete Is The Computer You Bought Yesterday

And A Microsecond Is The Amount Of Time It Takes
To Go From State Of The Art To Obsolete

Me Thinx If Mr Gates Didn't Write This
It Should Be His Motto

[White Stripes]

considering i need a new mobo cpu and ram anyway (a 7 year old computer is pretty old) this isnt all that bad.... tho i think i have a few more years left on old trusty (no problems yet)

[SamSeeSam]

Well, I have four sata ports and only two ide ones on the new pc
Sata is faster I take and hence the move was only a matter of time. Most new hdds are in sata and not ide

Cheers

[ñòóKýçrÕôK]

Seagate is going to all SATA drives because their IDE drives are crap, lol. They cna't hold up to today's software demands. Too much processing (reading and writing) for them to handle the load. I think it was either 2 or 3 years ago I bought 3 Seagate IDE drives back to back in less than a year and all 3 crashed on me. I would've said it was due to poor handling by Wal-Mart employees considering that's the store I bought them in except for after the third Seagate crashed I broke down and spent $10 more for a Western Digital at the same Wal-Mart, same size IDE drive, and it's still running strong as the main drive in my wife's pc. My daughter's pc is run by a 40gig Western Digital that is at least 8 years old and still runnin like a marathon man. And yeah I can see soon enough all drive makers going to all SATA. Technology is technology because it grows and expands, and reaches out into newer and usually better direction. My new Intel board has 6 SATA hookups if I recall correctly and 2 IDE cable connecters. I'm now running a 250gig SATA Western DIgital that you couldn't give me any amount of money to swap out for a Seagate of the same make.

[SamSeeSam]

Well, a 40gb seagate hdd is still running for 6 years for me

* SamSeeSam keeps his fingers crossed

Cheers

[White Stripes]

i have a 10gb and a 20mb (yes mb not gb... its an old XT drive) seagate that still work...

tho most of the drives i use are quantum (i wish they were still in the HDD business... -never- had a problem out of a quantum)

an interesting irony is that i have a -huge- pile of dead HDDs ... -all- western digital.. (no... im not kidding... i cant keep WD drives working)... tho one of them makes for a good and interesting wrist rest for mouse usage...

[J a M e S]

uh, i doubt they will stop support for IDE just yet, alot of people to anser to if they do,

[Bearded Blunder]

i tend to agree.. look at the situation with floppy drives, systems havn't needed them for a long time, many systems come without.. but mothrboards still sport the connector...

[J a M e S]

true, i just boiught a thing that converts my usb port into an ethernet port, and the driver came on a floppy disk, id say it'll be a good 5-10 years before they stop making ide , lol