Semi-OT: IDE & SATA to USB "dongles"

Zane H. Healy wrote: I also see that SATA-Firewire enclosures are available, I'll probably pick one of those up one of these days, as going forward, SATA looks to be the better choice. ---------------------------------- 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. Whether USB is better/worse than Firewire - I tend to avoid religious arguments. And interfaces are not static anyway. The portable device market has lead to new generations of interfaces being created. CF+ and CF-II are widely used. And in the background being prepped for the future, CE-ATA, a simplied ATA (only 8 commands). And it has variations using MMC as a physical layer, and new layers including 1, 4 and 8 bit serial interfaces. Ain't life grand? Billy