The End of the Line for IDE Hard Drives

If you have an older PC, you're probably familiar with the wide, gray, ribbon-like cables that connect your hard drive to your motherboard. Those are IDE (also known as Parallel ATA or PATA, or just ATA) connectors, part of a technology that has endured for 20 years. And now, with the great success of Serial ATA (SATA) technology becoming apparent, old IDE is about to reach the end of the line: Seagate has become the first hard drive company to announce it will stop making IDE drives by the end of the year. Most of the other IDE makers will likely follow suit in 2008-09.

While this is the simple result of an old technology finally being put out to pasture as a new technology becomes available (SATA is superior in a number of ways and already owns 2/3 of the desktop market), there are some side effects that you might need to consider if you plan on keeping your old computer around for the rest of the decade. The big one is compatibility: SATA drives won't work with old IDE motherboards, so if your IDE drive crashes, finding a replacement will become more difficult. As time wears on, you'll likely have to turn to used drives instead of new ones, which will be even more likely to fail. Upgrading to the newer technology can still be done with a SATA add-in card or a USB or FireWire connection, but many older PCs have trouble booting from non-motherboard-connected drives, and performance will be slower.

Bottom line: Got an old PC with a rickety hard drive? Unless you want to get an entirely new computer, you might put a hard drive upgrade on your shopping list this Christmas.

LINK: Seagate plans to stop manufacturing IDE drives by year end