All the Core 2 Duo motherboards I've been looking at provide only 1 IDE connector. And apparently the only purpose for which that lonely legacy connector is intended is to allow us to hook up our optical drives. The industry seems to have decided that it's time for us to all throw away our PATA hard drives and move on to SATA.
Well, frankly, I am not ready yet to throw away my PATA drives. I've got three 250GB and one 160GB drives that I spent non-trivial money on and which are all still completely usable.
My first thought was that if/when I move to one of these "new age" motheboards, I would have to pick up a PCI Express IDE controller card. But strangely enough, I don't see any PCI Express IDE controllers for sale.
Am I just not looking in the right place or is no one making IDE controllers for PCI Express? After all, I thought the PCI bus was almost as dead as PATA is supposed to be. What's up with this?
-john, the PATA dinosaur
Well, frankly, I am not ready yet to throw away my PATA drives. I've got three 250GB and one 160GB drives that I spent non-trivial money on and which are all still completely usable.
My first thought was that if/when I move to one of these "new age" motheboards, I would have to pick up a PCI Express IDE controller card. But strangely enough, I don't see any PCI Express IDE controllers for sale.
Am I just not looking in the right place or is no one making IDE controllers for PCI Express? After all, I thought the PCI bus was almost as dead as PATA is supposed to be. What's up with this?
-john, the PATA dinosaur