IDE life cycle

[ThinkPad560X]

Im planning on getting SSD drives for my ThinkPads and it will be awail before I get one for each of them. The good thing is they will be coming down in price. And reason for getting SSD is my older ThinkPad Hard Disk Drives start clicking and making noise and SSD should last longer than HDD.
All my ThinkPads I own all have the IDE pin plug-in. Not sure of my ThinkPad SL500 or IdeaPad S10. All new laptops and desktops use SATA drives now. The last time I've been to bestbuy sometime last year. There were all SATA and don't remember seeing any IDE, atleast I don't think there were any. Is IDE HDD getting harder to get now and coming to a end or will there always be IDE, SCSI and SATA Hard Drives?

[Harryc]

I think IDE drives will be harder to get over time. As it is now the selection has been drastically cut.

[ThinkPad560X]

If it does come down to that. Do they make an adapter for SATA to IDE, kinda like how the ThinkPad 390X requires the IDE adapter to plug into the board?

Image Link for a reference:
http://cgi.ebay.com/IBM-Thinkpad-390-39 ... 335ca8a792

[GomJabbar]

If it does come down to that. Do they make an adapter for SATA to IDE, kinda like how the ThinkPad 390X requires the IDE adapter to plug into the board?

I have a desktop PC motherboard that came with an adapter to use a PATA drive with the SATA connector on the motherboard. Note that at least some of these adapters are 'one-way' and only work for adapting in one direction.

See:
http://forums.legitreviews.com/about2411.html

http://www.newertech.com/products/usb2_adaptv2.php

http://www.satacables.com/html/sata_to_ide_adapter.html

[Harryc]

It would be 'nice' if Lenovo came up with a solution to do this...but I've never found them to be that innovative when it comes to accommodating customers needs with regard to future internal devices and external peripherals, particularly after the product is withdrawn. Case in point... the T43 2010 error and the various white listing fiascoes. I think the only solution that makes sense for older Thinkpad IDE laptop owners wanting large SATA hard drives is to use an Ultrabay 2nd HDD adapter. It's elegant, cheap, removable, portable, and it is proven to work. It even exists for Ultrabay 2000.
http://cgi.ebay.com/SATA-2nd-HDD-caddy- ... 335f6d9b49
Now that I've said that someone is sure to come along with a speed handicap diatribe, so lets wait and see.

[Unknown_K]

How long does the average laptop last for the average user, maybe 3-5 years if that? I don't see a major need for IDE to SATA adapter laptop drives, especially when people can offload data using USB external drives to clear up clutter.

It seems like the older slower cooler running IDE laptop drives can last a while, I still have plenty of 80-200 MB drives that still work fine. My problem seems to be finding 2-10GB drives for laptops in my collection. Newer drives seems to run hot inside machines that are allready hot and the applications (playing saved video for one) seem to beat those drives quite a bit so they don't last very long. The last of the high capacity IDE laptop drives are probably going to be the same as the last of the IDE desktop drives, hard to find. People will just junk the old laptop and get something new with SATA.