Windows 7: Days are numbered for decade-old hard drive connection tech

TVeblen · 06 Jun 2014

Sounds like you had the same 386-DX I had (with a 387 math co-processor!).

OvenMaster · 06 Jun 2014

Considering that my mobo is one year old, is still on the market, and sports an IDE port (which I'm using with a WD 160GB HD), I'm not terribly worried about SATA ports going away anytime soon.

alphanumeric · 07 Jun 2014

Quote: Originally Posted by TVeblen

Sounds like you had the same 386-DX I had (with a 387 math co-processor!).

Yeah, I think it was a DX-33 (33 MHZ).

Britton30 · 07 Jun 2014

@datapod, is the device in you picture just a HDD and its PCB?

datapod · 07 Jun 2014

Quote: Originally Posted by Britton30

@datapod, is the device in you picture just a HDD and its PCB?

"Hardcard is the genericized trademark for a hard disk drive, disk controller, and host adapter on an expansion card for a personal computer."

More @ Hardcard - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Wenda · 08 Jun 2014

Quote: Originally Posted by alphanumeric

lol, my first real home PC motherboard had 6 ISA slots on it. That was it, there was no PCI. No onboard anything except one of those big 5 pin DIN keyboard ports. That meant an ISA card for Video, another one for sound, and a multi IO for floppy, hard drive and serial parallel ports. Oh and one for the modem and eventually one for NIC. That left one spare slot. MSDos and Windows 3.11. lol, something around about a 20 MB hard drive and 4 MB of RAM.

< At the time. I'm not going to say when that was though.

Heheh! Mine was very similar, an Osborne 386SX20 with 4 x 1mb RAM chips soldered to the board. A 256kb graphics card, and an 80mb hard disk the size of a shoebox. It didn't have a CD-ROM drive or a sound-card. I bought a sound-card (Soundblaster 2, 8 bit) but it never got the CD-ROM drive.

Remember how some of the early sound-cards had an IDE connector on them so you had somewhere to connect the CD-ROM drive? If you didn't have a CD-ROM you could hook a second hard disk to it.

Lady Fitzgerald · 08 Jun 2014

Quote: Originally Posted by TVeblen

My guess is that they will use the PCIe bus, but not a PCIe slot. Probably a new connector on the motherboard.

The article linked in the first post in this thread shows a drawing of the new connector that will replace SATA ports. What will be needed are MOBOs and CPUs that will support more PCI-e lanes. I find 40 lanes to be too restrictive now, let alone when the new ports and SSDs come out.

alphanumeric · 08 Jun 2014

Quote: Originally Posted by Lady Fitzgerald

Quote: Originally Posted by TVeblen

My guess is that they will use the PCIe bus, but not a PCIe slot. Probably a new connector on the motherboard.

The article linked in the first post in this thread shows a drawing of the new connector that will replace SATA ports. What will be needed are MOBOs and CPUs that will support more PCI-e lanes. I find 40 lanes to be too restrictive now, let alone when the new ports and SSDs come out.

I've seen a few motherboards with a bunch full length PCI-e slots but some are actually only x8 or x4. You have to read the fine print to see what your actually getting. I'd like to see the spacing between some slots increased too. Put in a double width video card (or two) and you lose the use of the adjacent slot(s). Like a lot of PC tech, 40 lanes likely sounded like a lot when it was conceived.

alphanumeric · 08 Jun 2014

Quote: Originally Posted by Wenda

Quote: Originally Posted by alphanumeric

lol, my first real home PC motherboard had 6 ISA slots on it. That was it, there was no PCI. No onboard anything except one of those big 5 pin DIN keyboard ports. That meant an ISA card for Video, another one for sound, and a multi IO for floppy, hard drive and serial parallel ports. Oh and one for the modem and eventually one for NIC. That left one spare slot. MSDos and Windows 3.11. lol, something around about a 20 MB hard drive and 4 MB of RAM.

< At the time. I'm not going to say when that was though.

Heheh! Mine was very similar, an Osborne 386SX20 with 4 x 1mb RAM chips soldered to the board. A 256kb graphics card, and an 80mb hard disk the size of a shoebox. It didn't have a CD-ROM drive or a sound-card. I bought a sound-card (Soundblaster 2, 8 bit) but it never got the CD-ROM drive.

Remember how some of the early sound-cards had an IDE connector on them so you had somewhere to connect the CD-ROM drive? If you didn't have a CD-ROM you could hook a second hard disk to it.

lol, at the old Sound Blaster cards. I had a box full of those at one point. And the audio cables that connected to your CD-ROM drive so you could play audio CD's on your PC. Sorry for taking this thread a bit off topic. When I see really cool new tech I can't help but think of the old days and what it was like then versus now.

King Arthur · 08 Jun 2014

Honestly, SATA had a surprisingly short run compared to its IDE/PATA predecessor. Color me surprised at this bit of news.