The death of IDE HD's

squiffy

squiffy

squiffy

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Looks like the final nail in the coffin of IDE hard drives.

Seagate Barracuda 7200.10 500GB ST3500630A ATA-100 16MB Cache - OEM £145.69
Seagate Barracuda 7200.10 500GB ST3500630AS SATA-II 16MB Cache - OEM £112.79

£32 more expensive for the PATA version. Although the 320GB's are the same price, 750GB PATA is a tenner more, and 400GB PATA are £20 more.
I've moved over from PATA to SATA, only have a IBM 60GB deathstar (still working! in a USB2/Firewire enclosure and WD 80GB that I'm using as the boot drive in my main rig. I only have free slave slot on this rig.

When will the last PATA hard drive be trundled off the production lines? 1GB?
 
It'll be a while before PATA drives disappear simply because there's so little difference between a SATA drive and a PATA one. All that's required is a minor modification to the PCB and the appropriate connectors, all the drive and positioning electronics are identical.

What we will start to see is more of what you've quoted - price differences due to lower bulk purchases. The same behaviour can be seen with memory, SDRAM is now quite expensive because folk aren't buying much of it.
 
The electronic difference between PATA and SATA drives is a little more than minor, but most manufacturers simply use a cheap UART chip to save producing two different controller boards for each model. The majority of SATA drives on the market are native serial drives, so PATA editions have the added few pence cost of an interface.

As rpstewart said, however, demand is the major factor in bring the price down - SATA drives are simply far more popular.

Edit: Oh, and no apostrophe in plural abbreviations :)
 
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