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."

Gone missing?

Nothing for you to see here. Please move along.

I didn't know Slashdot was stored on IDE drives!

Re:What about osdev?

As a consumer, I'd rather get rid of the legacy shit (ATA, ps2 keyboards, bios, DOS/Windows :-). But for hardware hacking/os writing, a USB stack, firewire stack, etc are more work (and don't provide the immediate feedback like 100 lines of assembly to read the raw keystrokes).

You an still have fun with an ARM breadboard kit, though :-)

Re:What about osdev?

Yes, that is why Apple computers use EFI [wikipedia.org] 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 [intel.com] 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.

Re:What about osdev?

By jonwil (467024) [slashdot.org]

The #1 reason I want something like EFI is to eliminate the world of proprietary bootloaders/selection mechanisms for good. Essentially the BIOS would be the one that displays the list of boot options.

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 [fosdem.org] (Google cache) [209.85.135.104]

What are your thoughts on the Extensible Firmware Interface (EFI) [wikipedia.org]?

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 [tianocore.org] 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.

Re:What about osdev?

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.

Re:PS2 keyboards

You can have my Model M keyboard when you pry it from my cold dead fingers....

Your proposal is acceptable.

Re:PS2 keyboards

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.

Re:PS2 keyboards

Having USB ports for the mouse & keyboard would take the fun out of that!

Don't worry, the speed at which WinXP handles booting up with the mouse and keyboard in different ports than last time more than makes up for that.

Re:PS2 keyboards

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.

You'd think they'd know better

Dropping hard drives can really damage them.

well, shit.

shit. can I get a hand? what the hell are you all doing sitting around letting me make myself look stupid?

bastards.

Re:well, shit.

can I get a hand?

0 . ^ .0 0
0.l l l l0 0
l l l l 1/^0
0\ . . . ./0
0 \ . . ./0
 
000101010000
011010101000
101010101110
0 10000000010
001000000100

There ya go. Pretty easy, once you get through the blasted lameness filter. I'd use lorem ipsum, but I don't Slashdotters would appreciate it much. So far, in the time it's taken me to get this past the lameness filter, your post went from a "2 Funny" to a "3 Funny". I wonder how many other people are attempting to craft a response as well. Let's see if using 'l's will get me past the "Too many junk characters" filter. Yup. Now I see that Slashdot doesn't support <pre>, and <tt> is broken. How about <ecode<? Nope. Gotta find something for those spaces. Ah! How about alternating periods and asterisks for a dark background? Ah! Too many junk characters again. Let's alternate the asterisks with spaces. Nope...Replacing the asterisks with zeros works, but now you can't really see the hand. Ah, heck. Let's make a 0/1 bitmap. That's funny...it added a space in the middle of one of the (short!) lines. Let's append spaces to each line...Didn't work. Ah hell, now your post is at "4 Funny". I'll leave both hands up.

Long story short, don't bother with the ascii art.

Good

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.

but the motherboards!

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?

Re:but the motherboards!

I remember about a year back reading about state of the art motherboards that got rid of all this crap we don't need. I seriously think that more manufacturers should do this. I have no use for a serial, parallel, ps2, floppy connectors, IDE connectors, and all the other legacy junk they insist on putting on motherboards. Every one of those ports takes away 1 (or several in the case of parallel/ide) ports that could be something useful, such as USB, FireWire, SATA, or something that people will actually use. If people want to hook up ancient hardware, let them use PCI adapter cards and port replecators.

Re:but the motherboards!

USB keyboards require special drivers

Did you miss the Microsoft to Drop Windows 95 by Year End article back in 2001? :)

Re:How nice for you.

But those of us who use computers beyond the confines of gaming and parent's basement often use serial ports and parallel ports and all the other useless legacy junk you so 1337ly disdain.

Amen. I'm surprised that on Slashdot, a site that supports software freedom to a great extent, there is so much anti-free-hardware sentiment. All this "junk" is still useful, but serial and parallel ports are essential. They were once widely-supported for a good reason, and it wasn't just so that you could hook up a serial mouse and printer to your computer. They are now disappearing, even they have not been replaced by a viable alternative.

PATA won a ribbon cable

Seagate SATA long time on this.

They're a bunch of SASies.

PC Joe won't understand SCSI isn't old enough.

When will old PCI die?

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.

Re:When will old PCI die?

Hah - I can answer both of these.

1. There are PCI-e 1x gigabit NICs and some of 1x video cards around. I think I've seen some 1x RAID cards as well, but I wouldn't swear to it.

I've got a PCI-e 1x gigabit NIC I put into machines without onboard gigabit - performance and CPU usage are both excellent. Gigabit on PCI tends to saturate the PCI bus and have much higher CPU usage - you should always check that any onboard gigabit NIC is PCI-e.

2. Tweaktown did some comparisons of a 7300GT on 1x and 16x - the results show significant differences:
http://www.tweaktown.com/reviews/1045/pci_e_x1_gra phics_performance_with_galaxy_geforce_7300gt/index .html [tweaktown.com]

Tom's Hardware have two articles comparing 1x, 4x, 8x and 16x by masking off pins on graphics cards. The performance graphs are very interesting.

Original article - X600XT, X800XT, 6800GT
http://www.tomshardware.com/2004/11/22/sli_is_comi ng/index.html [tomshardware.com]

Newer article - X1900XTX, 8800GTS
http://www.tomshardware.com/2007/03/27/pci_express _scaling_analysis/ [tomshardware.com]

The basic conclusion is that you only need 4x for lower-end resolutions and quality, but if you're pushing high-end cards you really want 16x.

It's a bad idea

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.

Re:Does it really matter?

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.

Re:Does it really matter?

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.

Re:Does it really matter?

no one will stop progress because you complain.

On the contrary, PATA drives will certainly continue to be made if people continue to buy them.

Re:Does it really matter?

does this mean if I use IDE I can grow a beard now?