Seagate To Halt Production Of IDE Drives At The End Of 2007

Are you still quite fond of your IDE drives? If you're not wanting to switch over to SATA drives, you'll not have much of a choice when purchasing new drives in the future. We already knew it was going to happen eventually, however, I really didn't expect it to happen so soon. The first major hard drive manufacturer has decided to cease production of IDE drives by the end of the year.

It's really quite understandable to hear this, as SATA drives now make up 2/3 of all desktop hard drive sales and 44% of all laptop drive sales. That's not to say that we'll no longer see IDE ports on our future motherboards, as most CD/DVD drives still rely on the older standard.

I personally still enjoy my IDE drives for two reasons. One is that I have my trusty external hard drive enclosures that make things so easy for accessing data. The second is that I've tried Vista, and I don't really care for it all that much. As we all know, most boards require you to have a floppy drive installed on your PC to install XP onto a SATA drive. That's just a pain in the ass to deal with, since I don't use floppy drives anymore. That's not to say that my main PC doesn't run on a SATA drive, as I know that it has many advantages in the realm of speed.

So far, none of the other major hard drive manufacturers have mentioned anything about halting production of IDE drives, so I expect we'll still see them around for some time. Don't be too surprised if everyone sees what Seagate is doing and follows suit.

Report: Seagate plans to stop manufacturing IDE drives by year end [via arstechnica]