If a machine's 3-4 years old, IMO it's worth maintaining. Once you get to 9-10 years I don't see the need unless you've some custom hardware setup which can't be replicated.

It gets harder and harder to source replacement components that are still in decent condition, just to keep a system to the same spec. And older systems are often less efficient power wise; compare the Intel Prescott CPUs to what we have now, for example.

I agree that keeping older hardware running is a challenge. Convincing customers is a different issue, however. They don't understand why just about any other appliance is fine after 10 years and a computer is not. I have one potential customer right now who is completely befuddled as to why XP "will stop working." The perspective of such people is a computer is an appliance.

And that is not all. This potential customer has a 5400 RPM 20GB hard drive installed in a 2002 system. The age of the system does not suprise me at all, but the hard drive size? 20GB!

These kinds of users are in a different plane of existence with respect to computers. Trying to bring myself down to their level of understanding and perspective is challenging. Just about anything I try to explain results in glassy eyes.

I finally was able to convince these people that XP was not going to stop working and that the real issue was over the long haul the possibility of security breaches will grow. They seemed to accept that. Yet when I discovered they are using a 20G drive I just had to sit back and breath slowly. :)

That all said, I am having a hard time find new IDE drives. They exist, but I now wonder whether I ought to readjust from my previous statement about just installing an IDE drive. Perhaps a PCI-to-SATA converter is easier. Not that they would ever notice any performance hit. I can buy 250G SATA drives for less than 80G IDE drives. Not that these particular folks have any need for a 160G or 250G drive.

Have you tried newegg.com? About the biggest I've seen is 160 gigs.

Point taken. :)

Seems like a lot of work. :) I notice many of these converter boards are designed or intended for RAID configurations. I suppose if only one drive is connected that negates the RAID, but in the end I need to get these people to understand that keeping their old system alive is going to cost money one way or another. They might decide to buy a new system with Windows 7 preinstalled, but that is out of my hands and I don't do Windows. :)

Yes. I found one 80 GB new for more than a 250G SATA. I can buy a 160 GB refurbished IDE for less than $20, which is what I will propose to these folks. That is 4x what they have been using. They just need to understand that new IDE drives are rare nowadays and they need to understand the risks of refurbished. They might have no problems but refurbished is not going to come with any long-term warranties.

You aren't forced to use them as RAID devices. You can certainly just use them as any other SATA controller.

I feel compelled to remind you as well that a modern SSD will outperform any hard drive in any configuration--however, this is only for true internally-RAIDed (or equivalent) SSDs with multiple FLASH chips and not, say, xSD or CF cards, or USB keys other than those super-high-end ones by Kingston et al that really are SSDs in a USB key package. That is, the speed of an individual FLASH chip/die is slower (especially on writes, and exponentially slower on erases) than perhaps even ancient hard drives.

In your application, this could be a problem with DOMs (Disk-On-Modules), but you don't mention what you're doing with your old machine that still uses IDE/PATA interfaces. If it's a firewall or something (semi-)embedded, a DOM or Compact Flash (CF) with adapter (CF's interface is virtually identical to 44 pin / 2.5" IDE) is better than any hard drive because you don't care how long it takes to boot, but probably do (or will) about the moving parts inside a drive! (I know this from first-hand experience.)

As I shared in Post #17, this is not my computer but a potential customer's. They are not computer literate. They use the system for nominal web surfing and writing dead tree letters. They don't know what a web browser is. They only know they click on the "thingie" the ISP installed when he visited to connect them (small additional service provided along with the connection: installing Firefox or Chrome). They have a 5400 rpm 20GB IDE installed. That should describe their usage and computer knowledge. :)

Greetings
I don't find it especially difficult to talk to people who think of PCs as appliances. I explain to them that most of the appliances they have eg: Toasters, Refrigerators, Ovens and Telephones are very old technology so they have "settled in". While they may have some advantages, gas toasters, iceboxes, wood stoves and crank telephones would likely be unwelcome in a modern home. PC's are relatively new and developing very fast so improvements are commonplace and quick to market. For the forseeable future, it is wise to upgrade your PC every 5 years or so. This is especially true since prices for a given power are, and will continue to be, dropping very rapidly also.

The only problem with this argument is that for casual users, the Facebook and email crowd, much of what they do depends little on processing power, ram, or hard drive speed. Video cards and ISPs are the bottle necks here. This is a little more difficult to explain and/or fix.