Traditional IDE/PATA drives have less than a week before they will no longer make their way to high end Intel systems. Beginning with the ICH8 south bridge Intel no longer plans on providing native IDE support on south bridge chips. Just a day ago, a certain fellow at the inquirer ranted over how Plextor is the only manufacturer of SATA optical drives. In the end he said that IDE’s days are numbered as he believe that by next year IDE will be reserved only for low end systems. Mr. Demerjian said that the market really needed a kick start to get more suppliers for SATA optical drives, and it seems Intel is going to be that boot that will be doing the kicking. It’s about time PATA dies, I really want a SATA dual layer BluRay R/RW drive in my next desktop system.
-John Havlik
[end of transmission, stay tuned]