[conspire] Tempus fugit: PATA is 99% gone

[Rick Moen]

People who attended CABAL will remember the gentleman who arrived with a
PATA (old 'IDE') drive from a dead Ubuntu Linux desktop system, still
wanting to get his files off it, and uncertain whether they're still
present.  This was a bog-standard 3.5"-platter workstation hard drive
from ~a decade ago.

He'd taken his non-functional workstation mini-tower to a PC repair
joint, which had done some not-very-clear investigation, claimed that
there is a valid ext4 filesystem on it, but (in the work write-up) cited
a somewhat nonsensical explanation for why he couldn't copy the files
off.  (To his credit, he didn't charge for this work.)  The vendor also
gave him a quotation for a replacement PC.

So, this fellow (our attendee) was still stuck wanting access to his 
old PATA hard drive's contents.  Various of us had Linux laptops, but
his drive was -not- in an enclosure.

I considered hauling out my old VA Research StartX MP workstation
(Pentium II).  We could open the case, jumper our attendee's PATA drive
appropriately, and hang it off the workstation's IDE chain.  Suspect the
PII's installed system is ancient Debian that doesn't know ext4, _so_ 
we could have gotten around that problem by booting a recent Knoppix CD
or such.  

But at this point, I was thinking:  Lot of trouble to go to, for someone
who's doing essentially nothing to help himself.  Every time I tried to
get him to take notes, he cited an excuse and just stressed that he
wanted a canned solution rather than to learn anything.  Also, I really
felt he ought to leave with the ability read his drive going forward.
As we repeatedly cautioned him, any new system was _not_ going to
support PATA.

So, I said, you can solve your problem by driving to Fry's in Palo Alto
and buying an external drive case for a 3.5" hard drive with USB
external connectors and PATA internal connectors.  He blanked and 
could not follow this.  Someone, I think it was Les Faby, offered to
drive over with him and make sure he bought the right gear.  Our
attendee declined, deciding instead to have his PC vendor do it.

Anyway, today I happened to visit Fry's for other reasons.  Out of
curiosity and suspecting I knew what I'd find, I checked the aisles.

There are dozens of external cases for SATA hard drives, bitty ones for
2.5" laptop-sized drives and bigger ones for 3.5" workstation-sized
drives.

Care to guess how many models of cases for 3.5" PATA drives they carry?

One.  

They are almost totally gone.

If you want a case, better hurry.  However, remember, PATA is history
(and also wasn't ever very good, anyway).