Seagate to Drop IDE Drives by Year End 566
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."
Re:Oh fuck. (Score:2, Informative)
It's not ideal, but it works plenty well enough.
Re:Oh fuck. (Score:3, Informative)
Re:but the motherboards! (Score:5, Informative)
Re:What about osdev? (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Too bad... (Score:1, Informative)
Re:but the motherboards! (Score:2, Informative)
All-in-all it took rather longer than it would have to just do it normally, and I coastered CDs in the process.
Re:What about osdev? (Score:2, Informative)
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.
Re:When will old PCI die? (Score:5, Informative)
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_gr
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_com
Newer article - X1900XTX, 8800GTS
http://www.tomshardware.com/2007/03/27/pci_expres
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.
Re:What about osdev? (Score:5, Informative)
Re:but the motherboards! (Score:3, Informative)
P.S. - I work for an Advertising firm in my city. We run a few big digital (LED) billboards. One of which is pretty old and requires a serial port. The others are Ethernet.
Re:IDE graveyard (Score:3, Informative)
USB to Serial dongle
USB to Parallel dongle
Quite nice actually, one little USB hub on the right spot, and just one tiny cable to the PC.
And yes, I am buy my laser printers second hand; the LaserJet 6MP is perfectly fine for most
purposes, and good, low page count second hands go for little money.
Re:Too bad... (Score:3, Informative)
I generally only buy Seagate or WD.
Re:Too bad... (Score:2, Informative)
Re:PS2 keyboards (Score:2, Informative)
Re:When will old PCI die? (Score:3, Informative)
Just a thought, but as it stands, there's just about zero advantage for a home user to switch to 1x PCI-e, which is the same speed as PCI.
Sure, PCI is (usually) a shared bus, while PCI-e is point-to-point, but nobody really gives a fuck because they're all using the SATA and ethernet ports on that are built into the motherboard (which generally get their own bus these days, anyway), and they just don't have anything else which is IO-intensive enough to warrant such a defacto-meaningless change.
Now, if 16x PCI-e slots became the norm, and people find an application which actually requires more throughput, you'd see old-school 32-bit PCI disappear overnight.
The question is, then: When will computers and applications stop being stagnant?
Re:PS2 keyboards (Score:3, Informative)
PATA is long overdue to be obsoleted, even optical drives are starting to come in SATA interface configurations. Next to go should be PCI slots.
Re:What about osdev? (Score:4, Informative)
http://www.missl.cs.umd.edu/winint/index2.html [umd.edu]
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.
Re:What about osdev? (Score:4, Informative)
Re:It's sour. (Score:3, Informative)
But still, you're right that you will need to completely replace your pc to upgrade though, and while quite annoying, it's not the end of the world. You can still choose not to upgrade, and all you'll miss out on is the "high detail" setting in new games. If you'd prefer, you could buy a games console for playing games on, (the xbox 360 gets most of the games), and keep your pc for playing the games you already have and surfing slashdot. Though you'd slowly pay that way, because console games are more expensive than pc games.
Re:Does it really matter? (Score:3, Informative)
PATA has nothing going for it.
Re:What about osdev? (Score:3, Informative)
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).
Re:PS2 keyboards (Score:5, Informative)
Re:PS2 keyboards (Score:2, Informative)
Windows has a minor problem with SATA (Score:4, Informative)
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.
Re:PS2 keyboards (Score:3, Informative)
I also lament the loss of serial ports on most new motherboards. I still use the serial port on a fairly regular basis (lots of hardware has RS232 diagnostic ports), and USB->Serial converters are surprisingly flaky (although not that surprising I guess, UARTs have tiny buffers and tight timing because everybody still seems to use chips from 1980 to make them. I even have some PCMCIA serial cards that are worthless for anything beyond a chat session with a Cisco, the looser timings on the PC-Card slot make it impossible to send any bulk data across the serial link without overflowing/underflowing.
I am a bit surprised that floppy ports are still a standard feature. We've already lost one of the PATA ports but that useless floppy port still hangs on.
Re:Windows has a minor problem with SATA (Score:1, Informative)
get a patch from your drive manufacturer, and all will be fine...might have to format though....
Re:PS2 keyboards (Score:3, Informative)
Re:PS2 keyboards (Score:3, Informative)
Seagate = Maxtor, Maxtor still making IDE (Score:3, Informative)
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?