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    You do have to be careful of "old laptop SCSI drives" which are casually / visually similar to "old laptop PATA drives" but quite incompatible. Commented May 24, 2017 at 21:01
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    Do note that any somewhat recent desktop PC will no longer have an IDE/PATA connection. My old Core 2 machine has one, but my i7 machine most definitely doesn't. Commented May 25, 2017 at 7:34
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    @Baldrickk I've specced and bought a couple of moderately high-end machines recently, and they do have PATA sockets. But we're speccing motherboards with a lot of PCI-E slots so maybe we're into "ship all the connectors" territory. Also PATA was used in mass-market desktops for optical drives even a couple of years ago. Even that wouldn't be much use if the OP doesn't have cable any more. Commented May 25, 2017 at 10:49
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    @ChrisH It's definitely a rare breed that still ships with PATA headers on the motherboard. I mean, I have a bunch of new high-end systems with Core-i chipsets that even have ISA slots, but it's definitely specialist territory for new builds with these dinosaur techs still intact. Commented May 25, 2017 at 11:46
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    @underscore_d Yes, they're useful - otherwise we wouldn't go to such lengths to get special industrial motherboards with them. For our devices, XP is end of the line for support so they'll be on the way out eventually but for now it all still works. Nothing too special with ISA - it's all still there (MMIO, DMA, IRQ... still at the bottom of bare metal even today). Commented May 25, 2017 at 18:34