According to a news published at Ars Technica, Samsung is planning to stop IDE drives production by the end of the year, favoring the SATA interface.
From its introduction, the SATA interface saw a rapid diffusion in the market (higher speed and lesser cable mess in the case are certainly among main reasons of this). Also mainboard producers seems to favor SATA as shown by the progressive disappearance of ATA connectors on the PCB.
Is this a hint that also IDE optical drives will follow the same trend? Until now the IDE interface has a huge advantage over the SATA one: it is universally compatible with all optical drives. How many SATA optical drives are collecting dust on a shelf because the SATA controller on the mainboard is compatible with HDDs only?
