Recto Cranial Inversion IDE 1 SATA 0

[dumbas..]

http://www.theinquirer.net/default.aspx?article=32808

:devil: Hope I dont get flamed for the title. It has context in the article.

An interesting article I thought. Particularly the piece about the ‘new’ generation of HD drives being produced in IDE format not SATA – the way the pc industry seems to be progressing. I quote:
“
“Then came the final straw, I was reading a review on the DRM-infected Blu-Ray drives, specifically this one, a fine review of a rather awful product. Can someone please tell me why Pioneer, maker of a $1000 Blu-Ray, cutting edge, rights-removing DRM-infected, high-tech, next-gen, way-cool drive made the #_)$(# thing IDE? How many high end luxury PCs that are going to be equipped with one of these will not have billions of SATA ports?”

So I can have a $1000 Blu ray drive and no where to fit it in future. Early adopters be warned, your investment may not last long!

Talk about Dumb as….:confused:

[celtic_druid]

Had a SATA MSI CDRW combo. Was excellent right upto till it died. Nothing to replace it with either since SATA optical drives seemed to have peaked early (at a time when only a few Intel based boards supported them) and then died.

As far as I know Asus had one, but I don't think it was ever sold. Lite-On developed one for an OEM that backed out and as mentioned the Plextor drives.

[Inventive Software]

IDE's still good for optical media, as the transfer speeds are low enough that bandwidth problems aren't noticable. SATA CD/DVD/BD/HD-DVD drives won't take up unless there's a new format that's capable of using the increased bandwidth SATA has to offer.

And AFAIK motherboard manufacturers aren't dropping IDE in the near future, as they're keeping one socket on the board to accomodate the 98% of optical drives that are IDE.

[foxyshadis]

The problem is southbridge designs are dropping IDE support. nforce, intel, etc, unless there's a major uprising among licesors. So the only way to keep IDE if that happens is to have a specialized IDE-only chip on the board, which increases the cost.

The only nice thing about the current situation is that with only one IDE device there's no competition for bandwidth & time.

The complete disconnect between drivemakers and mainboard designers is pretty amazing, that's all.

[Doom9]

I for one like that the cost of legacy support has just gone up. It is pretty hard to find a SATA drive, but chipmakers phasing out IDE connectors will finally give the drive makers the kick in the butt they so deserve. Especially those with compact computers have a lot to benefit from SATA.. it isn't so much about speed than convenience (smaller cables, no more 3 way cables that you have to twist and turn to connect two devices to it, external SATA, hotplug, RAID pretty much always on board). And unlike other upgrades (RAM, CPU sockets) this one doesn't cost the world.. a DVD burner sells for $40 and at least the Samsung SATA burner sells for the same amount so you don't incurr any extra cost.

Then again, mainboard makers have been placing SuperIO chips onboard for ages.. even with the extra cost they keep supporting all that legacy crap like serial, parallel interfaces, floppy drives (I know all about Microsoft's last millenium approach to loading drivers.. the only really good thing about Vista is that it can load drivers from devices other than floppies) and the like.. the first thing I do when I get a new PC is enter the BIOS and turn off all that crap.. I have done so for 8 years now and mainboard makers are still not the wiser.
At least Shuttle has finally woken up (though not completely, the floppy is still there) http://www.anandtech.com/systems/showdoc.aspx?i=2788&p=2 (although they still have an IDE port and reintroduced PCI.. that's another area where hardware makers are being backwards.. there's nothing wrong with making a PCIx DVB card for instance but the only viable extension cards seem to be RAID controllers and network controllers)

It is as usual the typical hen and egg problem but one side has got to budge to make progress.