Hard drive manufacturer Seagate has reportedly briefed its distributors with news that the company will cease manufacturing IDE hard drives by the end of the year. Instead, "nearly all" of its top-end hard drives will be offered with SATA connectivity only.
If reports are to be believed, Seagate's announcement may prompt others to follow suit as SATA continues to drain PATA's market share. That's not to say support for the parallel ATA standard is going to vanish overnight though, as nearly 34 percent of global hard drives sold still rely on PATA, according to a report published at Australian-based ITNews last January.
Add in the PCI/PCIe-based expansion slot market, and it's 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.
Western Digital, another major hard drive manufacturer, has also been slowly phasing out IDE from its enterprise and desktop lineup --- mainly in high speed and high capacity hard drives. For instance, their newly announced Caviar GP lineup will be SATA-only.