Anybody else notice... 750Gig IDE drives are nowhere to be found...

 

I know that most everybody now has motherboards that support SATA drives, but a number of us have the original Intel motherboard Tom used to supply in his original product.  That motherboard does have two SATA ports, but they do not work at speeds as high as current mother boards.

 

Recently I started having some errors on one of my disks.  I wanted to replace it with as big a drive as I could find.  I know the 1TB drives are out of the question, they were never made in an IDE version as far as I know.  I already do have one 750Gig IDE drive in my array, and I know a month or so ago Newegg still showed them on their web-site, but.... no more.

 

Then I went looking elsewhere... I can't find any 750Gig drives are a reasonable price anywhere... they're gone...  :'( :'( :'(

 

This will eventually be a huge problem for somebody with a disk failure in an IDE based array filled with 750Gig drives.. 

 

I'll need to try an IDE to SATA converter, and get rid of the existing IcyDock trays I have, or put in a new SATA interface card, and still get rid of the IcyDock IDE trays... either way, it will be difficult.  I have one other 750Gig IDE drive in a media-player... I'll probably use it to replace the failed drive... but this is a short term solution.  Eventually, I'll need to add or replace other disks in the array...

 

Anybody know of a source of 750Gig IDE drives??

 

Joe L.

When I saw stock dwindling on these I bought a few of them a while back from zipzoomfly.com. Glad I did.

 

Frankly, for the price they are going for now (if you can even find them in stock), I would buy a 1TB and use a SATA adapter.

Newegg Canada has it listed $169.99, so they must have stock (one would hope).

 

I know I had to use the internet to find one 4 months ago because they were not possible to find locally.

I got it from Anitec.ca and everything went fine. They have stock at $199.99

 

Here is an EXTERNAL 750G drive at $120.  Cracking this type of case open and harvesting the drive is pretty easy.  (Update:  Just realized that this could easily be a SATA drive and not an IDE drive.  That's what I get for posting before that first cup of coffee.  )

 

I'd recommend, however, that you get one of the Supermicro MV8 controllers and buy the SATA drives rather to continue to invest in PATA drives.  I've started buying the WD GP drives and am pretty happy.  Initially it was to avoid having to upgrade my PSU, but now I think they are just a better choice.  They are more than fast enough for typical unRAID applications.  Although a shorter warranty, common sense tells me that the less stressful environment (5400RPM vs 7200RPM) would have to have a positive effect on longevity.  (The Seagate 1.5Ts are looking better and better too - with lowest $/gig and firmware update now available.)

 

It you were going to buy 2 of the 750G's mentioned above at $247 (incl shipping), you could buy 2 WD 1T drives + the MV8 controller for about $307 - and have 2T vs 1.5T.  Your concerns about future issues will also be addressed.

I ran in to this problem a while back...I had an original 12 IDE system and wanted to upgrade.  I'd invested in 12 docs so I decided to go SATA and go to 16 drives.  The motherboard supports 2 SATA as Joe mentioned so I bought four drives and added a sata I pci card.  The 4 drives sit on top of the tower and equal almost half my storage capacity so eventually I'll downgrade to less disks when the 2tb drives become affordable and either sell the IDE only system or have a backup of a backup.