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Western Digital Ceases Shipments of PATA HDDs

By Joy Hou - on 24 Dec 2013, 9:00am

Western Digital Ceases Shipments of PATA HDDs

Western Digital is discontinuing production of hard drives with PATA interface.

Image source: Western Digital.

The PATA (Parallel ATA) standard is the predecessor to the current SATA (Serial ATA) standard. It first surfaced on the market in 2003, and existed in 16MBps, 33MBps, 66MBps, 100MBps, and 133MBps versions. After the first SATA platforms and hard drives were released, the PATA interface still survived for a decade. Till today, there are HDDs with PATA interface. Also, many present-day motherboards still support up to two of such storage devices.

However, Western Digital will stop selling its WD800AAJB, WD1600AAJB, WD2500AAJB, WD3200AAJB, WD4000AAJB, and WD5000AAJB HDDs (that come with PATA interface), come 29 December. It is said that even the SATA interface will get a replacement in the following two years or so. Next year, motherboard manufacturers will start to implement SATA Express interface with up to 2GBps bandwidth, a significant increase over 0.6GBps bandwidth offered by the SATA 6Gbps standard.

Source: X-bit Labs

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