According to The Inquirer, sources from within the channel report Seagate as having briefed them that it's the end of the road for IDE hard drives.

It appears that Seagate plans to cease manufacturing IDE hard drives, also known as PATA (Parallel Advanced Technology Attachment), by the end of the year and will focus exclusively on SATA-based products instead.

This would hardly be surprising news, given that SATA (serial ATA) has overtaken PATA as the interface of choice for hard drive connectivity. Perhaps more importantly, SATA has become the main interface for the primary hard drive connectivity as well -- the majority of OEM system shipments now contain a SATA-based hard drive instead of a PATA one.

Compared to the pace of adoption of other technologies such as the floppy drive, USB and Bluetooth, SATA has virtually blazed past the finishing line to establish itself as the new de facto standard.

However there's no need to panic, according to Ars Technica:

That's not to say support for the 21-year-old PATA standard is going to vanish overnight; 34 percent of global hard drives [are still PATA ones, and that] is still an awful lot of hardware ...

... this means that most motherboard manufacturers will probably keep at least one PATA slot around for awhile longer, similar to how ISA slots were available long after most of us had ditched our old ISA peripherals.

It is worth noting that while Seagate might be the first major hard drive manufacturer expected to announce such plans, there is little doubt that where Seagate goes, the others are sure to follow shortly after.

Last month, Seagate announced its first 1TB drive, the Barracuda 7200.11, and began shipping perpendicular drives in early 2006.

Seagate Australia was unavailable for comment at the time of publication.

Luke Anderson of ZDNet Australia contributed to this report.