Hard drive evolution could hit Microsoft XP users

[soda72]

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/8557144.stm

Moving to an advanced format of 4K sectors means about eight times less wasted space but will allow drives to devote twice as much space per block to error correction.

Boy they get us coming and going...

I'll miss you XP

 

[Krusty]

Well maybe by 2011 MS will have their head outta their hind-end and work on something that isn't totally bloated and deplorable... But in the meantime, the article states:

"To help Windows XP cope, advanced format drives will be able to pretend they still use sectors 512 bytes in size.

When reading data from a drive this emulation will go unnoticed. However, said Mr Burks, in some situations writing data could hit performance.

In some cases the drive will take two steps to write data rather than one and introduce a delay of about 5 milliseconds."

It will still function under XP. Your existing drives will also still function. You have a year to stock up on existing terabyte drives with 512k sectors before this will ever affect you.

[BaldEagl]

I've got 7 drives in 2 machines comprising about 2TB and that doesn't count my laptop or the other drives I have lying around not in use.  I think I'm good for a while.

[Delirium]

Will the type of format affect both NTFS and FAT types?

If so, why would it affect both?

[gyrene81]

Will the type of format affect both NTFS and FAT types?

If so, why would it affect both?

Yes...they are increasing the size of the sectors on the drives to 4000 bytes instead of the current 512 bytes...if the OS isn't capable of reading the sectors properly then starting with sector zero it won't be able to utilize the drive properly...and depending on the OS (like DOS), not see the drive as useable.

All is not lost though...just have to use a newer OS.

By contrast, Windows 7, Vista, OS X Tiger, Leopard, Snow Leopard and versions of the Linux kernel released after September 2009 are all 4K aware.

[Krusty]

All is not lost though...just have to use a newer OS.

Er... except for the part where they say a fix will be made for XP so that it works like normal (with a small increase in write times, but when they are already microseconds, you won't notice it unless you try to write a gig at a time)

[Denholm]

Guess it's time to crack out the UNIX manual. I doubt Microsoft will clean up their mess anytime soon.

[Fulmar]

I've got 7 drives in 2 machines comprising about 2TB and that doesn't count my laptop or the other drives I have lying around not in use.  I think I'm good for a while.

I just converted over to 7 last week and I've been pretty happy with it.  Mainly I wanted to move to 64-bit.  I haven't slimmed it down too much.  I had ~38 processes on XP and run about 50 on 7.  Haven't noticed any performance drawbacks, but haven't benchmarked at all.

Borrowed my mother-in-laws Dell laptop the other day and dropped my jaw with 102 processes on Vista.

[Skuzzy]

UNIX has supported dynamic sector sizes since 1982.  Welcome to the future Microsoft.  Sheesh.

[eagl]

UNIX has supported dynamic sector sizes since 1982.  Welcome to the future Microsoft.  Sheesh.

I dunno skuzzy...  It's just one more thing for the user to foul up.

[Skuzzy]

Done right it is hard, if not impossible, to goof up.  UNIX simply detects the sector size and uses it.  The user has no control over it.  Microsoft's archaic filesystems are just that and have held back the industry for decades, but that is nothing new.