In-house article: The Premature Death of PATA

Big B

Big B

HWF Godfather
Hooray for content. Anway, I just put up an article with some concerns about PATA being put out to pasture a little too soon.

If it were Intel alone, that would be one thing, but nVidia's nForce 500 series chipsets have cut the available IDE channels to one. ATi's SB600 has also dropped to one PATA port. While I haven't run across anything indicating similar actions from VIA or SiS, they will undoubtably do so within a few years. By that time, I think SATA will be much more common, particularly on optical drives.
 
Good artical. This is the world of technology - what's in today is out the door tomorrow. What was hot property is now yesterday's news. It's impossible to keep up with technology unless you happen to own half of China.

The problem with buying into new technology is you never know how long it's going to stay current. Imagine you just shelled out on a Skt370 processor, only to find out that it's going to be replaced by Skt775 a few months later. That motherboard you just spent a fortune on is now incompatible with the latest set of processors!
Do I buy Blueray or do I buy HD DVD? Am I going to end up with a useless peice of kit in a few months?

IDE is still the most widely used hard drive interface. The least the manufacturers could do is ensure compatibilty.
 
If it weren't for the RAID thing, I'm inclined to think this would be a lot less of an issue. Problem is, it's hard to point the blame at any one party, and truthfully, it's more to do with the technology than anything else.
 
Even today, the speed of developments still baffle me. Not long ago, we at HWF were recommending S939 AMD64s for a future proof platform. Now it is obsolete, it's not our fault, but as far as we could see it was the best available option. This industry is very unpredictable.
 
Addis said:
This industry is very unpredictable.
Click to expand...
Gets more worst when a competitor comes out... Like before Intel was not pushing out products so fast but when AMD came out with its outstanding products Intel started releasing new products very fast......
 
YES, that would be sweet if optical drives used sata. well honestly if ide was gone i wouldn't mind i mean really, its slow and the cables are huge. In some cases ide HDD's are more expensive than sata drive, granted that goes both ways but it goes to show. Yeah if you buy a new system its almost definetly going to have sata drives vs ata, thats whats i've seen anyways
 
But, like I said in the article, there tends to be an issue running devices outside of hard drives in a RAID-mode enabled controller. On paper, SATA optical drives shouldn't be an issue, and should be just as easy to implement as PATA drives. For whatever reason, they're not, and from what I can tell, this is left up to the motherboard manufacturer. Unfortunately, they're not likely to readily support it unless there's a demand for it. There's not a real demand for it because optical drives really don't benefit from anything past ATA33. OEM's are clamoring for it either, thus a real push to get this problem resolved is lying stagnant.
 
Lol...the article basically addresses the issues dealing with the removing the PATA ports entirely and the lack of available optical drives and said support.
 
The same can be said for PCIe and the rapid dissappearance of AGP on motherboards. I've also noticed that PCIe is replacing normal PCI in some cases.
 
Yeah, but I'm less worried about PCIe. Chipsets still support 5-6 PCI slots, so it's not like they're whittling them down just yet. PCIe replacing AGP offers higher bandwith so it's a more natural step. PCIe replacing PCI and PCI-X is going to take longer, but doesn't seem to have as much of a hassle (outside the obvious interface differences) as the PATA to SATA.
 
yes actually i am kinda concerned about that to. 2 x16PCIe slots take up a whole lotta spce, almost all boards now have only three pci slots. Boards with only one PCIe slot usually have only four or three pci slots. Even then the total number in subtracted by one in most cases as the graphics cards take up a pci space
 
But that's a trade off you have to weigh. I'm sure the people with a lot of ISA slots said the same thing when PCI slots were introduced. And today, there's a lot more items integrated, so for most people 3 PCI slots is plenty for their expansion needs. PCI slots will still be around for awhile. I mean, look at how long it took for ISA slots to disappear of motherboards. It's not some compatibility, it's a matter of time. Storage controllers and high-end NIC's can benefit from PCIe, so you can buy some in PCIe x1 cards. There's also at least one TV tuner card using the x1 slots. It's happening, but you have to understand that a lot of features people use are integrated, and those are fine for most people.
 
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