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Ide sata and pata

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Panopticon

Member
My local Craigslist has a guy selling a new Wd 500gb for $50. I emailed him to ask if it was sata or pata and he tells me neither and says its IDE. Isn't IDE just a standard of data transfer meaning sata and pata are both IDE cable types? I dont want to drive 20 mins to find out this is a pata drive I cant use.
 
Panopticon said:
My local Craigslist has a guy selling a new Wd 500gb for $50. I emailed him to ask if it was sata or pata and he tells me neither and says its IDE. Isn't IDE just a standard of data transfer meaning sata and pata are both IDE cable types? I dont want to drive 20 mins to find out this is a pata drive I cant use.
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IDE=pata they use the wide ribbon cable
SATA 1/2/3 use much smaller cable

Bring with you a SMART reader (like CrystakDiskInfo), and see if the drive is throwing any SMART errors. It will also show you how long the drive has been in use.
 
PATA is a backronym for 40 pin IDE ribbon cable parallel ATA devices to distinguish them from the newer serial ATA. The term IDE is antiquated, as all drives in the last 30 years or so since MFM/RLL drives are "IDE" (servo controller and low level functions controlled in the drive itself making all modern HDDs a self contained block storage device). The actual command set and physical interface is called ATA or ATAPI.
 
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Congratulations to you for knowing the real definition. Yes, IDE is sometimes used by the less knowledgeable to mean PATA. PATa yourself on the back. 🙂

IDE stands for Integrated Drive Electronics. That means the drive has a circuit board with all necessary electronics on board. Then there are two common interfaces today - Serial and Parallel. I know you can now complete the definition. Cheers!
 
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That's a good price for an IDE drive. Prices on those are higher, due to less sales volume.

As an aside, it's too bad they never developed a 1TB IDE drive. The interface can handle it, it would be trivial, but apparently the leaders in magnetic HDs determined that the market for such a drive would be too small, and not cover the R&D necessary.
 
Another reason to pass on this deal: 9 out of 10 Craigslist sellers are murderers. Worse, they don't know the meanings of SATA, PATA, and IDE.
 
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