27 May
2006
27 May
'06
6:28 p.m.
On Saturday 27 May 2006 18:25, Tony Duell wrote:
FWIW, all of the failures I've seen in an IDE drive were failures in the
HDA, not in the electronics. "Boardswapping" a new board onto most IDE
drives is trivial if you have a couple spares of the same drive, if
there's really a problem with the electronics. I know that may not
appeal to you, Tony, but most of us don't have the ability or spare
time to repair surface mount electronics... :)
Anyhow, there's enough new products being designed with IDE hard drives
in them, that IDE will still be around for at least 5 years if not
much, much more...
And there's no reason you can't just collect some drives to be NOS for
future replacements, either. IDE actually has been around for quite a
while (in production) compared to most drive standards, SCSI is
probably the only thing that really comes close (unless you call IBM's
channel interface a "drive interface"..).
Pat
--
Purdue University ITAP/RCAC --- http://www.rcac.purdue.edu/
The Computer Refuge --- http://computer-refuge.org
Better or not,
most OEMs are driving hard to eliminate IDE. SATA
gives = a
reduction in cable costs, connector costs, test fixtures, etc.
This can = be
a big saving on a large array. Plus less physical cable space
needed, = and a
small but significant power savings in drivers. Finally, it gets
rid of some of the skew problems for parallel transfers as the
speed ramped up. = ATA
was getting so bad that cable length was only 8 inches at the
highest transfer speed.
Here at WD, many of our new generation products will be offered in
SATA only.
So (to get it on-topic for classiccmp), people with machines that
only support IDE drives are going to have problems in the future
finding working replacements (I doubt very much if any of us could
repair any reasonably-modern IDE drive, alas). I've seen adapters to
use IDE drives on SATA hosts, but not the reverse.