Seagate plans to cease manufacturing IDE hard drives by the end of the year and will focus exclusively on SATA-based products. Seagate is the first major hard drive manufacturer to announce such plans, though others will likely follow suit as SATA continues to sap PATA's market share. According to a report published at Australian-based ITNews last January, SATA now accounts for 66.7 percent of desktop hard drive sales, 44 percent of laptop sales, and an unspecified (but increasing) amount of enterprise storage connectivity.Not only has SATA overtaken PATA as the interface of choice for hard drive connectivity, but it's become the main interface for primary hard drive connectivity as well—meaning that a majority of OEM system shipments now contain a SATA-based hard drive rather than the older PATA standard. Accomplishing all of this in less than a decade is impressive, particularly when compared to the slow pace at which floppies or the original USB interface have been supplanted by newer technologies. Unlike the slow pace of adoption that characterized other standards, SATA has virtually sprinted across the finish line.That's not to say support for the 21-year-old PATA standard is going to vanish overnight; 34 percent of global hard drives is still an awful lot of hardware, and quite a few CD/DVD drives still rely on PATA. This means that most motherboard manufacturers will probably keep at least one PATA slot around for awhile longer, similar to how ISA slots were available long after most of us had ditched our old ISA peripherals. Add in the PCI/PCIe-based expansion slot market, and its unlikely that PATA support is going anywhere any time soon—a fact which should reassure anyone who is afraid Seagate's SATA-only policy could leave us all with mountains of PATA drives and no way to access them.
