Introduction Am I the only one who's noticing the rapid push to get parallel ATA drives out of sight? While it shouldn't be any surprise that it's happening, the timing is what's troubling. Many people have perfectly good PATA drives that have a decent capacity, yet Intel's new ICH8 southbridge is devoid of any PATA support. Serial ATA ports have been bumped up to six instead of the four found on ICH6/ICH6R and ICH7/ICH7R. 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. Going back to the useable PATA drives many people still have: that's an issue. If it's serving the purpose, has enough space, and still works, you tend to keep it. Even as a simple backup, a 40GB hard drive has yet to be too small to be useful. Hard drive companies are still producing and planning for PATA drives. Seagate's 7200.10 hard drive line, which utilizes perpendicular recording, still includes plans for IDE hard drives along with SATA ones. I don't know the ratios of PATA drives to SATA ones, but it doesn't seem like the hard drive manufacturers are starting to ditch PATA yet. Problems, Ahoy Another thing to consider is optical drive support. Aside from a few SATA variations largely produced by Plextor, CD- and DVD- drives are still coming with PATA. Sure, a few SATA drives are available, but I have a hard time believing that you'll convince people to jump to a drive double in price that most people probably won't notice and/or care. This is nothing against Plextor. The company makes a good product and factoring in the quality, yes, it's only right that they charge a higher price. It's the same thing if you were to buy a Sony boom box instead of piecing together an CD player, reciever and speakers made by, say Onkyo, for listening in your room. Sure, the system pieced together is going to walk all over the boom box, but not everyone has, or want to spend, the money for the component system. Many people have good drives, and most of them aren't going to drop it if it's doing the job and still works...at least for an interface change. Besides the simple interface issue, what about OS installation? In a system with ICH8, for example, you can expect at least some of the motherboard companies to offer an additional one or two IDE channels through an external controller chip. The problem comes in when you have a controller chip that's not designed for optical devices or that the OS installation CD, which is more that likely Windows, does not recognize the controller. It cannot communicate with the rest of the system, and can't install the OS. I'm sure some of you might be thinking, "Well, IDE and SATA drives, should work on said interfaces without a hitch, so what's the issue?" If only it were that simple. As you're probably aware, motherboards are frequently coming equipped with RAID functionality. When these controllers are in RAID mode, only hard drives are able to function with this capacity.
..And More Problems There's also another problem. Like I mentioned earlier, there's only a few models available that use a SATA interface. As if this weren't enough of a problem, just because you have SATA ports doesn't guarantee that the SATA optical drive will work on your system. I found this out in a ClubOC article about a Plextor 16x DVD+/-RW SATA drive. The article linked to a compatibility list for that model. If you look through that list, you will find a sizeable list of motherboards. However, I'd like to bring to attention the motherboards that are not there. While I can't say for sure if your motherboard isn't on that list, the Plextor PX-755SA model in question won't work. The ClubOC article does make a point that it's not in a buyer's best intrest to get that drive if it's not on the list. Many of the motherboards on this particular list do sport an Intel chipset, it's not everyone. I e-mailed Plextor about this. There response was that the support was with the motherboard manufacturer. Folks, this is not a good thing. While there are work arounds in large scale environments for deployment over networks with unattended installs, as well as ghosting methods, for the person with a single computer (yes, they do exist), this really isn't a viable option. While it's becoming somewhat prevalent, not all motherboards boot off of USB devices. Another possibility would be using a PCI IDE card. However, if it's setup in a RAID configuration, you may run into the problem I mentioned earlier. This can also create a new problem with newer motherboards sporting PCI Express slots. Typically, these only support 2 or 3 PCI slots, one of those is frequently taken up by a sound card. If someone is running an SLI or Crossfire setup with 2 slot GPU coolers, you're likely to loose another slot. Conclusion Now, I don't want to come across as blaming Intel for all these possible problems. It's not Intel alone as nVidia and ATi have whittled down PATA support in their latest chipsets. What I do want to make clear is a concern about the SATA push. Like it or not, Intel tends to lead the charge in new technology adoption. AGP, ATA100, PCI Express, RDRAM, BTX, USB...the list could go on. Sure, not all have been kept around, but there's a very good chance that when Intel pushes something it's going to become a standard. I don't think the company pushes things simply for the hell of it. I see Intel as a very driven company that leads the industry. They have a huge influence on the way the industry operates. That's why I am concerned about their push on removing PATA/IDE support from their latest southbridge. I believe it's premature to do so, given the relatively small demand for SATA optical drives. This doesn't mean that the industry won't make an effort do improve compatibility. However, I see Intel leading the cavalry and leaving most of the forces in the dust, moving forward more cautiously. It's not the first time I've wondered what Intel was doing, but once I learned the whole story, it made sense and usually put me in favor of the change. It's probable that they do know more than I about this. I'd like the pieces to fall into place and have the situation as clear as day. However, with what I can see, I have to be wary and I have to be concerned. You should be too. Please Digg this article.
