27 May
2006
27 May
'06
3:25 p.m.
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.
Oh well... Looks like designing an ST506 (host) to IDE (drive) interface
is not going to be a particularly useful thing. Better to work out a way
to keep the old ST506s/412s/etc working.
-tony