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?

[Burdell]

Nothing for you to see here. Please move along.

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

Re:What about osdev?

[larry bagina]

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 :-)

PS2 keyboards

[Joce640k]

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

Re:PS2 keyboards

[ozmanjusri]

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

Your proposal is acceptable.

Re:PS2 keyboards

[pomerol]

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.

Re:PS2 keyboards

[British]

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

[dotgain]

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

[Fred_A]

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).

How else can you have a mouse with 105 buttons ?? Brilliant design I say !

Re:

[h3]

You can still have fun figuring out which orientation the USB plug should go in while you are crouched under your desk. Great design,USB guys! I owe you a punch in the face!

Re:

[raddan]

Yes, but you know-- there's actually no reason not to allow you to plug a mouse into a keyboard's PS/2 port and vice-versa, except that it allows motherboard manufacturers to cut some costs on the second controller for the mouse. That's why the color-coding was introduced-- so that people wouldn't try plugging one into the other. Before AC'97, I had several computers (including my beloved ThinkPad 365CD) that didn't care which one you plugged it into, because the controller was the same on both ports. It

Re:

[Lord Apathy]

Not True! My mouse and keyboard ports run left to right. Or is that right to left. Well anyway, my mouse port is the one on the left. I think. Just a second. Yeah.. its the one on the left.

Re:

[blackicye]

removing PS/2 ports will allow for even smaller motherboard form factors as well as a marginal cost reduction in manufacture. Besides Model Ms are available in USB flavor, or you could always use a PS/2 - USB adapter.

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:PS2 keyboards

[walt-sjc]

Went down to the local OfficeMax the other day... No SATA optical drives at all. Ditto for Staples. The industry needs a big kick in the nuts to dump old legacy shit. Seagate dumping IDE is a kick in the nuts to OfficeMax and other retailers to wake the fuck up, and start carrying modern accessories. Even buying a DVI cable is a painful process - you are lucky if you have ONE to choose from (there are 8325 flavors of the frickin pinout, with monitors and cards keyed so only ONE cable type works...)

If you have a legacy IDE system, you can always get IDE to sata converters. Ditto for PS/2 to USB.

Really old legacy PC's just are not worth the trouble. If you have need for a low-end firewall box (always the stated use for an ancient box) you are better off with an embedded device running openWRT or something similar. A big old Pentium 133 that can't boot off a CD just needs to be retired already.

I'm just blown away that nearly every modern motherboard still has IDE, parallel, serial, and PS/2 ports. Hard to find ones that don't. I don't want the interrupts wasted! I don't want the board real estate wasted! I want more USB and ESATA ports on the back panel instead... Heck, if you feel you REALLY need the ports on the motherboard, put them on a header that I can extend to a few jacks on a PCI slot bracket, but I would prefer that they not be there at all.

Re:

[jandrese]

But I like my v.1 natural MS keyboard, and I'm not jumping to upgrade it anytime soon, despite it's PS2 nature.

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

Re:

[shaitand]

'removing PS/2 ports will allow for even smaller motherboard form factors as well as a marginal cost reduction in manufacture. Besides Model Ms are available in USB flavor, or you could always use a PS/2 - USB adapter.'

Forget space, there are very practical reasons for keeping keyboards a PS/2 Port. The fact is, if I have a functional keyboard plugged into a PS/2 port it just works, no special settings or configuration, no checking for compatibility or support. It works in simple utilities loaded off boot

Re:PS2 keyboards

[afidel]

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.

Re:

[GiMP]

Except that the Model:M isn't compatible with all of the PS/2->USB adapters and those adapters, well, quite frankly -- suck.

For instance, with my adapter, when I'm holding shift or ctrl for 5 seconds, it silently "forgets" that I'm holding the key. This is annoying when I'm paging in xterm (shift+page[up/dn]), hunting for a lost session in screen, etc. For games its beyond annoying, as your keyboard casually "forgets" that you're walking forward every 5 seconds.

Re:

[b0bby]

I have my Model M plugged into a cheap Hawking 2 port USB KVM, even though I'm not currently using the other port. It works fine, though I don't use it for games so I'm not sure if it would mess up like that.

Re:

[OrangeTide]

Well Intel's SATA interface has become the standard and at least some vendors are duplicating the interface (while providing an extended interface of their own). Also the cards have ROM, so if you're writing something for 16-bit real mode you can just make normal bios calls to your favorite ide, scsi or sata controller.

It's sad that it's far easier to use an Ethernet card at the lowest level than it is to use a USB host controller.

If I were to write an OS from scratch I would probably only implement support

Re:What about osdev?

[AnyoneEB]

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?

[Hal_Porter]

Why would you change though? Bioses are only used for booting these days

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: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 [72.14.235.104]

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:

[imroy]

Why would you change though? Bioses are only used for booting these days

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 loade

Re:What about osdev?

[Xiph1980]

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?

[cortana]

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:

[Anonymous Coward]

If I remember correctly, SATA does not have a standard interface for kernels to use but many controller vendors follow Intel's AHCI interface that is software compatible with standard PCI bus master IDE controllers.

Compaq HD interface - the original IDE

[calidoscope]

Out of curiosity, did IDE have a standard interface when it started, or did everyone adopt the most popular one?

The original 'IDE' drives were made for Compaq by Control Data (whose disk drive division is now part of Seagate), so that could be thought of as the original standard. The intent was to have something that acted a bit like a standard MFM drive + controller to allow for a simple interface to the ISA bus. The original IDE port was on Compaq's multifunction I/O card that had the FD controller, parallel port, serial port and IDE port on one card. The original drives were 'dumb' with no information on drive ge

Re:What about osdev?

[OrangeTide]

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.

Re:

[yvajj]

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.

You'd think they'd know better

[Anonymous Coward]

Dropping hard drives can really damage them.

Re:

[Mike89]

Lucky the Seagate consumer drives have a five-year warranty ;)

Re:You'd think they'd know better

[thegnu]

shit. I must escape the lt's

and employees get six. &lt---joke
                                                      ^
                                                      |
                                                  joke
       

well, shit.

[thegnu]

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.

[Short Circuit]

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.

Does it really matter?

[TheRealMindChild]

I mean, I have to go out of my way already to get a board that "supports" PATA. Hell, the last board I bought with PATA ports WOULDN't BOOT them... BY DESIGN. Even then, you'll get some RAID capability on the SATA ports, but not PATA.

Re:Does it really matter?

[CastrTroy]

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?

[Dunbal]

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?

[timeOday]

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:

[Ucklak]

Floppy discs are still widely available; phased out but still available.

Re:

[fbjon]

what shit, pata it almost as fast as sata drives, and has fuck all limitations either beyond hot swap, which hardly any sata drives can do anyway

The cables of PATA suck donkey's posterior: they're large, unwieldy, and are messy no matter how you round them or tuck them. Also, they use molex connectors which tend to be like teen pussy: so tight that once you get in you can't get out. Lastly, hot swap with SATA has always worked for me.

PATA has nothing going for it.

SATA cables...

[RMH101]

...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.

Re:

[Kjella]

I've never had a problem with the SATA connectors, even though I hear of several people that have managed to break them. And I work mostly with Shuttle XPCs which aren't exactly spacy. I've had them come undone a few times but that's better than excessive force being applied to the connector, if you ask me. The only time I can recall having a near-fatal accident was in a mixed SATA-PATA environment, because the "yank" when you loosen a molex connector causes all kinds of hell with all the other cables. In a

Re:Does it really matter?

[jimbug]

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

Oh boy. I'll probably hate myself for this

[iminplaya]

Yes. And you can stop showering.

Re:

[Anonymous McCartneyf]

Okay. Now, who will dig out that player for those old NASA tapes from '69?

Re:

[voss]

I just bought an HP A6110N which is an X2 4400 system. I have my SATA booting windows and I installed a 120gb IDE drive from my old system booting linux switchable in bios. It only has 1 PATA port so its primarily for legacy. I suspect a number of manufacturers will keep an ide port for legacy purposes at least on towers.

 

Re:

[Nazlfrag]

Reminds me of that lonely ISA port MB makers sometimes still slap on at the end of the PCIe/AGP/PCI slots. It's as quaint as those RS232 ports they have next to the 4 USB connectors. Yeah, I predict there will be a lonely IDE port probably near the floppy port just for old times sake, probably until they ditch the floppy port (ie. no time soon)

Re:

[tdelaney]

The motherboard I just bought for my server (DG33TL - bearlake) has no motherboad port. It's got the solder points, but no port.

I haven't put a floppy into a new machine for over 2 years. And I don't own a USB floppy drive either.

The floppy is finally going away.

Good

[Espectr0]

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.

Re:

[CastrTroy]

All of us with DDR RAM are pretty bitter about that. I was pretty bitter about a year ago when I tried to buy SDRAM. That stuff is expensive. Still, I can hope that we can go back to the good old days (march 2001???) when SDRAM was $CDN 30 for 512 megs. That was when RAM was the cheapest it has ever been, at least considering how much you could do with 512 MB back then. Now that's that won't even get you the shiny desktop on windows vista.

Oh fuck.

[r00t]

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.

Re:

[EvanED]

You can get a PCI controller card for $30 or so. I have two SATA drives, and most of my computer (including motherboard) is 5 years old, just as SATA was hitting the market, so I don't have integrated support.

It's not ideal, but it works plenty well enough.

Re:

[Dahamma]

http://sewelldirect.com/SerialATAtoIDEConverter.as p [sewelldirect.com]

Re:

[dwater]

...on the same web site :

http://sewelldirect.com/IDE-to-SerialATA-Converter .asp [sewelldirect.com]

a little pricey, IMO, but it's there if you want it.

Re:

[m4k3r]

Perhaps your hard drives are overheating ? Installing a fan may help :p

Re:

[cgenman]

Please note, that this is more than just a joke. I've made a lot of "silent" machines over the years (I was a quiet computer consultant for a while), and it's relatively easy to quiet a CPU or PSU safely. Most CPU's have thermal controls that will let you run more or less fanless, and with PSU's you just overbuy and underdraw.

But the Hard Drive is always the problem. HDD's don't generally have thermal protections, and the kinds of problems you're likely to see with hard drives are the ones that show up s

Re:

[flyingfsck]

Well, maybe you should add a fan to cool the HDD down???

Re:Oh fuck.

[networkzombie]

What will I do when my drive dies again?

Well, you shouldn't have bought Maxtor drives to begin with.

Re:

[level_headed_midwest]

PCI slots are far from dead, although my year-and-a-half-old NF4 SLi 939 motherboard that cost me $110 has 5 PCIe slots (2 x16, 3 x1) and only two PCI slots. Boards don't have four or five slots like they used to back in the late '90s through about 2005, but most have at least a couple if they're not a uATX or ITX board. Even the little guys generally have one PCI slot. And don't forget FireWire or USB 2.0- you can attach disks via FireWire and disks, tuners, NICs, and such over USB, as long as you don't ha

Re:

[VGPowerlord]

And how do I reinstall an operating system if the setup program doesn't recognize SATA?

If you're referring to Windows, that's what pressing F6 during the start of the textmode setup is for (I suspect you still have a floppy connected, though I could easily be wrong), or you can use nLite to slipstream your SATA drivers. Both solutions will work. If you're talking Linux, it shouldn't be a big issue to get a later revision that supports it.

Look, it's going to be inconvenient if you don't have SATA ports on y

works fine

[r00t]

My 450 MHz CPU is overkill for slashdot.

I don't even have a moving part for the power switch. I own a piece of history: the Mac G4 Cube.

but the motherboards!

[Doppler00]

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:

[Joe The Dragon]

The floppy and ps2 ports are unlikely to die any time soon.

Re:but the motherboards!

[Blkdeath]

The floppy and ps2 ports are unlikely to die any time soon.

I recently purchased a couple new Dell computers for my company and couldn't justify paying extra for a floppy drive or hunting the site for a model with PS/2 ports. Instead I got 6 USB2.0 ports.

ISA ports, serial/paralell ports, PS/2 ports, floppy drives, PATA; it's all old technology. Let it go already. Much like cars gave up on carburetors, houses gave up wood-based heating, etc. so must computers give up the antique technologies we cling to so dearly.

Re:

[EvanED]

Floppy drives are still almost essential if you want to install Windows XP or earlier on a computer with a RAID or other controller card.

It's an unfortunate truth.

Re:

[mmxsaro]

This is true, yes, but you can always slipstream your controller drivers into a Windows XP CD without much trouble (that is, if you have another computer nearby to perform such a task) to completely bypass the use of a floppy.

Re:

[EvanED]

This CAN take some effort though. I recently did this, slipstreaming (1) my SATA drivers, (2) Service Pack 2, and (3) all the hotfixes since SP2 into my XP CD, and I burned two or three coasters before getting it right. For instance, the first time I also tried to set up a semi-automatic install; but turns out this doesn't interact well with slipstreaming storage drivers like that. I forget what I screwed up after that.

All-in-all it took rather longer than it would have to just do it normally, and I coaster

Re:but the motherboards!

[CastrTroy]

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:

[karnal]

Serial ports are useful. Not so much in the home, but they're still useful.

Of course, a little USB-Serial dongle solved that issue for me when I had a thinkpad t42 at work a while ago...

Re:

[corychristison]

I use a Belkin USB-Serial adapter at work nearly every week. In all honestly, I think it's actually gotten faster since we moved to the USB adapter, but maybe that's just me. ;-)
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:

[Tony Hoyle]

Most routers have serial consoles, and I'm not sure the PPS example is that esoteric.

USB to serial is an extra device, costs money compared to a simple serial cable, and requires drivers (for some reason they still haven't standardised a usb to serial protocol, dammit!). It's a lot of hassle compared to walking up to a router and plugging the laptop into it.

Even more stupid is usb to serial adapters seem to all be cables with fixed plugs on the end, rather than a standard serial port - so you need a differ

Re:

[TheRaven64]

for some reason they still haven't standardised a usb to serial protocol, dammit

Interestingly, there is a standard for serial over Bluetooth which is very well supported. I haven't, however, seen any Bluetooth serial adaptors for under $100. Something I could plug into an RS-232 port and have it route the serial signal to bluetooth on my laptop would be very useful, especially if it could be powered from the RS-232 port.

Re:

[Andrew_T366]

I don't know about you, but I'd MUCH rather have parallel, serial, PS/2, and IDE connectors--which are backwards-compatible with most everything and do what they are meant to do well--than a half-dozen more USB or FireWire ports that don't even correspond to any devices that I personally use.

USB keyboards require special drivers and offer no interface-speed advantages unless you type at superhuman speeds.

Re:but the motherboards!

[lpontiac]

USB keyboards require special drivers

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

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Re:

[level_headed_midwest]

Actually, it's the PATA devices that do. SATA has been built into Intel chipsets since the 865/875, NVIDIA chipsets since the NF3, and ATi since the 200M. So it's simply putting down a few physical connectors. NVIDIA and ATi/AMD still support a PATA channel on their chispets, but Intel chipsets newer than the 975X don't. That means boards with the 965 and 30-series have to buy another IC and put it on the board to get the functionality. Ironically, parallel, serial, PS/2, and the other much older legacy stu

Too bad...

[DogDude]

That's too bad. Seagate makes some decent drives. I only hope that this doesn't apply to Maxtor, now that Seagate owns them. I looooove me some Maxtor drives.

Re:

[Enderandrew]

When I worked for HP, we bought Maxtor, Seagate, Hitachi and WD drives. However, easily 90% of our HDD failures were due to Maxtor drives. Of all the hardware we had from all the vendors, the Maxtor HDDs were the items we replaced the most in warranty. I'd never touch them with a ten-foot pole. I wouldn't use one if it were free. I hate losing data to HDD crashes.

I generally only buy Seagate or WD.

It's sour.

[Anonymous Coward]

The tech industry as a whole deprecates and wastes so much. It is a wasteful nightmare.

Re:

[Jeff DeMaagd]

PATA has been around for such a long time though, and we got about a four hear transition time. I certainly wasn't the quickest to adopt it, 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.

While I don't think I do anything that saturates a PATA connection, I like the fact that SATA drives can just be plugged into a backplane without fancy adapter circuitry, pro

Re:It's sour.

[garett_spencley]

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.

Re:

[TheThiefMaster]

Don't be stupid. Nearly no motherboards are BTX (in fact I'd forgotten about it), nearly no-one uses the 64-bit abilities of 64-bit cpus, nearly no-one properly uses more than one core (most games only use one, and those are the only intensive tasks most people run), and IDE isn't dead just yet.

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

Eh

[Jethro]

That's ok, I can still get my Western Digital drives.

Re:

[bladesjester]

I hadn't bought a WD drive in years because I had some trouble with a few where I used to work (we got a really bad batch). However, a couple of months ago, I decided that my laptop's drive (40GB split 30/10 between windows and linux) was too small for all of the things I want to use it for, so I got one of WD's 320GB external drives.

I have to say that I'm impressed. It's pretty quiet, has adequate air flow, and more than responsive enough for a storage drive.

It feels nice to have real drive space again a

PATA won a ribbon cable

[leek]

Seagate SATA long time on this.

They're a bunch of SASies.

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

ISA...

[gringer]

ISA slots were available long after most of us had ditched our old ISA peripherals.

You Insensitive Clod! I still have an ISA modem. Works much better than those silly winmodems, too.

What's next???

[NCTRNAL]

The next thing you know, I am going to be told that BetaMax, LaserDiscs, CRT's and Windows NT 4.0 are being phased out. (Huddles in the corner to sob away while playing on his Lite-Brite)

When will old PCI die?

[Michael Woodhams]

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?

[tdelaney]

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.

Re:

[adolf]

PCI Express will finally replace PCI when the newer format becomes capable of doing something useful that the old one could not.

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)

ISA is dead?

[Anonymous Coward]

You can pry my Novell NE2000 board, Sound Blaster Pro, Cirrus Super VGA card, and Promise LBA Extender from my cold, electrocuted hands.

IDE graveyard

[Vskye]

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.

Re:

[martijnd]

Come on, you have to keep those Taiwanese manufacturers busy!

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.

It's a bad idea

[Weaselmancer]

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.

What about SCSI?

[Purity Of Essence]

Surely they aren't going to stop making SCSI drives. The article seems to imply that but I'll chalk it up to pure dumbfuckery on the part of the author.

What about USB enclosures?

[baeksu]

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.

Why are so many complaining?

[muffen]

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 [addonics.com], 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 [cooldrives.com], 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 [linksys.com], you can even run Linux [nslu2-linux.org] 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.

Sources?????

[russ1337]

The Arstechnica article has this:

The Inquirer (via various channel sources) first reported the move, and a Seagate spokesperson told Ars that the report was "probably" true.

So there seems to be some doubt about the article. When you visit the Ars link to the Inquirer, there are no references whatsoever beyond "Chanel sources". The only other news article I can find links back to the Inquirer.

I think I'd need to see a press release from Seagate before this gets any more of my attention.

No more IDE?

[WoLpH]

So... they're going to sell SCSI only?

When will people learn that SATA is also IDE...

Windows has a minor problem with SATA

[master_p]

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.

Seagate = Maxtor, Maxtor still making IDE

[rtechie]

The subject say it all. This is consistent with Seagate's moves to make the "Seagate" brand for professionals and "Maxtor" for consumers. IDE is seen as a "consumer" item now, so it has been relegated to the less-prestigious Maxtor brand. That's it. Expect to see Maxtor making IDE drives for another 2 years.

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?