Possibly OT: Why no large PATA 2.5" hard disks?

I've been looking around lately at laptop hard drives, thinking that I might
like to upgrade the 60GB one in my Latitude D800 to something larger. I see
drives as big as 250GB presently on the market, but they're almost
invariably SATA-only. The biggest 2.5" PATA drive I've seen is 160GB in
size.

Does anyone know why this might be? It doesn't seem like PATA-equipped
desktops are being denied large drives. I've seen at least one 500GB 3.5"
PATA drive on the market.

William

William R. Walsh wrote:

> I've been looking around lately at laptop hard drives, thinking that I might
> like to upgrade the 60GB one in my Latitude D800 to something larger. I see
> drives as big as 250GB presently on the market, but they're almost
> invariably SATA-only. The biggest 2.5" PATA drive I've seen is 160GB in
> size.
>
> Does anyone know why this might be? It doesn't seem like PATA-equipped
> desktops are being denied large drives. I've seen at least one 500GB 3.5"
> PATA drive on the market.
>
> William
>
>

Increasing the platter diameter from 2.5" to 3.5" effectively doubles
the area for the media. And as for the type of HD, SATA seems to be able
to offer faster transfer rates and this would be the determining factor
in the use of very large hard drives that presumably would be holding
files of relatively longer lengths.

On Jun 5, 1:08 pm, "William R. Walsh"
<newsgrou...@idontwantjunqueemail.walshcomptech.co m> wrote:
> I've been looking around lately at laptop hard drives, thinking that I might
> like to upgrade the 60GB one in my Latitude D800 to something larger. I see
> drives as big as 250GB presently on the market, but they're almost
> invariably SATA-only. The biggest 2.5" PATA drive I've seen is 160GB in
> size.
>
> Does anyone know why this might be? It doesn't seem like PATA-equipped
> desktops are being denied large drives. I've seen at least one 500GB 3.5"
> PATA drive on the market.
>
> William

PATA is dying out. Hell, they only call it PATA to distinguish it from
SATA. They used to just call them ATA drives.

PATA drives will be increasingly hard to find. And as hard drive
capacities increase, new pata controllers won't be developed for the
larger platters. To save on development costs.

There's more economic justification in the desktop market, as there
are more desktops, and more desktop users have a justification for
the very large capacity drives.

Hi!

> PATA is dying out.

I hope that's not the case, and at the same time find that a little
hard to believe. Sure, PATA is not as fast as SATA, but there are a
lot of serviceable computers and even many embedded devices with PATA
hard drives that people might like to upgrade. Even some new devices
continue to use PATA drives, especially 2.5" ones.

I've never really liked SATA all that well. Other than speed, I'm not
sure it is an improvement. My primary complaint is the fit of the
cables--I'm always afraid that I'll pull them loose or snap the
plastic connector body right off the circuit board.

William