Why are PATA hard drives still so expensive?

[pigsinspace72]

Im in the market for a 500gb PATA hard drive so I went and looked on ebay and was shocked to see that almost all pata hard drives costs about 70-80$. Why would this be so expensive for such an old technology? Looking at the sata hard drives on newegg, 2tb hard drives where being listed off as around 80$. Can somebody please explain?

 

[clutchc]

Scarcity? Supply and demand? Low volume production? Those would be my suspicions.

 

[nukemaster]

Supply vs demand.

When everyone needed IDE drives they actually sold for less than the newly released SATA drives that performed no better(one drive at a time at least).

Now that IDE drives are in very low demand, the prices are UP.

This happens with everything computer related(and in almost all things to be honest).

You may be better off with a cheap SATA drive and a pci or pci-e to SATA controller if the drive is just for storage. They also make bridges that attach to a SATA drive and covert it to IDE, but I am guessing those to are overpriced.

You should see how much some of the serial and parallel port cards can go for now days.

 

[drxuess]

Probably because, many companies no longer manufacture them? and that they are rare brand new?

 

[pigsinspace72]

Scarcity? Supply and demand? Low volume production? Those would be my suspicions.

Supply vs demand.

When everyone needed IDE drives they actually sold for less than the newly released SATA drives that performed no better(one drive at a time at least).

Now that IDE drives are in very low demand, the prices are UP.

This happens with everything computer related(and in almost all things to be honest).

You may be better off with a cheap SATA drive and a pci or pci-e to SATA controller if the drive is just for storage. They also make bridges that attach to a SATA drive and covert it to IDE, but I am guessing those to are overpriced.

You should see how much some of the serial and parallel port cards can go for now days.

Well, I have 3x 500gb pata hard drive in raid and the controller can handle up to 4 hard drives and I was expecting these hard drives to be pretty cheap so I can upgrade my storage for semi-cheaply but it look like I'm not going to be doing that. The converters are pretty pricey i found.

 

[nukemaster]

Buy now and upgrade later does not always work because of this.

With video cards SLI and crossfire is another story because you can find used cards as soon as a new generation releases for decent prices. You generally do not want used hard drives.

 

[pigsinspace72]

Buy now and upgrade later does not always work because of this.

With video cards SLI and crossfire is another story because you can find used cards as soon as a new generation releases for decent prices. You generally do not want used hard drives.

Its not like I planned this, I had an old server that i long since retired that had 2x 500gb hard drives configured with a pci raid controller and I had another 500gb hard drive from one of my old computers so I started to use my raspberry pi and the raid controller to host a mysql storage

 

[nukemaster]

I did not mean any offense(hope it did not come off that way).