Where have all the hard drives gone?

[prouton]

(sung to the tune of "Where Have All the Flowers Gone?")

Last couple of days I've been looking for large 3.5" PATA hard drives, and they're either out of stock or simply not listed. A few weeks back you couldn't swing a dead cat without hitting a sale on a 500-750GB EIDE and now everything is serial. Did the big three (Seagate, Western Digital and Hitachi) stop manufacturing them and the sales were just blowing out the available inventory?

I realize that SATA drives are the wave of the future, and serial adapter cards are plentiful, but the computers I'm working with are short of PCI slots, have no PCIe slots, and hanging a hard drive off the PCI buss isn't exactly what I want to do anyways.

So has anyone heard any news that would account for this shortage / disappearance?

[Train]

newegg
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...GB%20-%20750GB

mwave
http://www.mwave.com/mwave/depthd-ide.hmx?

Walk in Frys in which ever is closes.
http://shop1.frys.com/ac/storelocator/index.jsp

Frys does not list every thing on there website.

[rbc1100]

I realize that SATA drives are the wave of the future

Not for much longer, I am already getting the hots for the next generation.

[prouton]

Well, the Newegg.com link is directly to my point -- they may list them, but they don't have any stock (no "add to cart", just a "notify me").

The MWave.com link did have large OEM drives, but call me me finicky -- I like a long warranty (retail kits have a longer warranty than OEM or bare drives).

And today I was in Fry's (Anaheim Hills) and asked (when I found a grand total of three PATA drives on the shelves). The clerk told me that only Western Digital is still making them, and they have some sort of "problem" at the moment. No idea...perhaps they've found high levels of melamine in the packing materials.

This article from ComputerWorld in July of 2007 backs up the clerks assertion, at least regarding Seagate: Seagate confirms 'phase out' of PATA disk drives

I have discovered (you can't keep me in the dark forever) that there are relatively inexpensive adapters to hang an EIDE interface onto a SATA drive. This saves a PCI slot that would otherwise be required for a SATA adapter card, and places the disk I/O directly on the controller chipset instead of on the PCI buss. Now I just have to figure out which ones are reliable. The upside is that I can now add a terabyte sized drive to my Pentium 4 based PVR.

[Steve R Jones]

Here's five more to choose from:
http://www.microcenter.com/search/se...=&sortby=match