Western Digital will put an End of Life (EOL) and End of Sales (EOS) status on all products that still use the Parallel ATA interface. The HDD manufacturer announced to its customers that sales of PATA products will stop at the 29th of December this year. The affected PATA drives are WD800AAJB, WD1600AAJB, WD2500AAJB, WD3200AAJB, WD4000AAJB and the WD5000AAJB.
PATA is nowadays pretty outdated and was previously also known as IDE, ATAPI or ATA. The interface used 40 pins, flat cables and was mainly used to connect optical disk drives and HDDs. Users who worked with PATA devices might also remember master/slave mode with jumpers
The interface has been made obsolete by Serial ATA (S-ATA) which provides higher data transfer speeds, hot swapping, and I/O queuing.
