Due to the waning popularity of Parallel Advanced Technology Attachment (PATA) technology in favour of the newer and speedier Serial ATA-based disk drives, Seagate has acknowledged plans to stop building the older products.
According to a spokesman from Seagate, the company plans to continue to offer PATA drives, often referred to as integrated device electronics (IDE) drives, until late this year or early next year.
Seagate's move away from the aging PATA standard has been in the works for some time, the spokesman said. The hard drive manufacturer's engineers stopped work on new projects late last year, he noted.
PATA technology, developed more than 20 years ago, has been used in desktop PCs for more than 15 years. It is less widely used in notebook computers, consumer electronics devices and servers. SATA, which offers a significant performance boost over the older technology, has in most cases displaced PATA as the hard drive interface of choice for increasingly complex storage demands.
SATA drives can zip along at speeds of 150MB/sec. and 300MB/sec., compared with the transfer rates of up to 100MB/sec. for PATA drives.