Serial ATA is looming quickly on the horizon. Both device and host
controller SATA implementations really lend themselves to behaviors
that have existed in SCSI for a while. SATA even defines use of SCSI
Enclosure Services.
Thinking ahead, by the 2.8 timescale, PATA could well be legacy hardware which could be supported only by an 'old' IDE driver, much like we already
have at the moment - I.E. we could remove the current 'old' IDE driver
sometime during the 2.7 timescale, and support SATA only via the SCSI layer.
This would save having any more than the minimum SATA code going in to the
existing IDE driver, and consolidate work in the future.