The death of ATA/IDE

Entry Filed under: Hardware

August 10th, 2008

Interestingly enough, even here in my technology dull hometown, ATA based devices are finally dying off. It was expected, sure, but not at this rate... On one day, every store in town has loads of ATA HDDs or CD/DVD drives available at very reasonable prices, but the next day, the price shoots up and the only two HDD capacities available are 160GB and 200GB (I have no clue on why is that so). DVD writers? Yeah, sure... "Call us in a week or two" is the usual response for trying to purchase one of these...

I needed to repair a low-end PC today that had an old Maxtor Slim 30GB IDE drive barely running inside (a sh**load of bad sectors was the culprit). I assume it was the unbelieveably high temperature that it was generating that finished it off, since my last repair session involved having to place a passive cooler mount on it just to lower the temperature to 50C (otherwise, it would climb up to a whopping 70C!). Who could imagine that such a slim piece of metal could almost boil water? With all the stores around not wanting anything to do with ATA's, I had to visit a crappy store that sells "el' cheap'o" and "use for a day, then throw away" components... When a sweaty guy appeared from behind the curtain (wizard of Oz, anyone?), I immideately noticed loads of HDDs stacked up on a shelf behind him... "Got ATA HDDs?" - I asked? "What kind?" - he replied with a "you just ran over my dog" attitude, "Any kind" - I politely mumbled, adding that a 160 or 200Gig capacity will do just fine. I waited while he printed out my warranty and placed the HDD in a LiteOn CD-ROM anti static bag (WHY!?)... Well, despite that, everything went just neat-o... It was a Hitachi DeskStar (formerly IBM). I'm running the poor lil' bastard as I'm typing this, and it's way queter and cooler, thank god.

Whoever invented IDE cables should have at least thought about curling them up by default, because those god damn wide cable stripes block every vent inside the chassis! Also, their size limitation and immence width really make my day when I need to squeeze them in there without damaging them or catching an active cooler...

What can I say... A 1m SATA cable I have in my PC is a dream come true, since connecting it does not involve breaking your fingers and watching out for damaged pins, and the MASTER/SLAVE configurations with those pesky jumpers are a thing of the past.

As much as I got pissed off today because nobody has ATA drives anymore, I can only say good riddance, it was about time...

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