::Hitesh:: 1,763 Report post Posted March 11, 2010 A change in hard drive format may force Windows XP users to upgrade to Windows 7. An article provided by BBC News paints a rather grim picture for Windows XP consumers. It may seem that those still clinging to the fear that Windows 7 will eventually pan out to be another Windows Vista may have no choice but to take the upgrade plunge thanks to the evolution of the hard drive. This won't mean an early death of XP by any means, but more of a performance hit despite other system specs. Here's how it will work: most hard drives sold in late 2011 may use an advanced format that will make it easier for hard drive manufacturers to produce bigger drives while making them more reliable and less power hungry. Of course, this is a good thing. Bigger games, bigger software, and our addiction to downloadable media means that hard drives need to keep up with the times. Unfortunately, this is where Windows XP comes crashing down in flames. Current drives are formatted into blocks of 512 bytes in size--this has been standard since the days DOS ruled PCs. By the end of 2011, all new hard drives will be formatted into blocks of 4K in size. Windows XP doesn't know how to handle sectors of that magnitude. To resolve the conflict, the new drives will have the ability to "pretend" they still use sectors 512 bytes in size. Reading data via the emulation isn't expected to be a problem: it's the data writing that may impact performance. "All other things being equal you will have a noticeable hard drive reduction in performance," said David Burks, a product marketing manager for storage firm Seagate. He also added that it could make a drive 10-percent slower in some circumstances. With that said, Windows XP users may have some decision-making to do next year if their current drives fail: purchase a new drive and suffer a reduction in performance via Windows XP, or purchase the new drive and a fresh copy of Windows 7. Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
KanagaDeepan 1,084 Report post Posted March 12, 2010 (edited) Is it so?? My C: is formatted with NTFS and the block size is 4KB and my OS is XP... I am using this setting for last two years with no problems.. Earlier during win95 days, FAT16 was used and that makes use of 32KB blocks for a 2GB HDD partition (2^16=65536blocks x 32KB = 2GB), after that FAT16 became obsolete as it can't handle >4GB partitions... Later FAT32 came and it is almost obsolete with 4GB MAX FILE SIZE restriction (Even penDrives/MemoryCards are coming with 8+GB and HD-DVD files are bigger than 4GB in size).. So I am using NTFS now with block size of 4KB without any issues from last 2 years... Am I missing (mis-understand) something here??? Please explain Hitesh Ji... EDIT:- Now I understand on reading the LINK contents FULL... It is NOT just the block size, but also the SECTOR size of 512bytes is going to get replaced by 4KB data per sector of HDD... I love my XP... I will use it for atleast 3 more years.. I will buy the last huge capacity 512byte sector HDD and use it till its lifetime... Atleast bring pir@ted WIn7, so that we can change from xp to 7 (Just kidding) FYI, I once written s/w for my office during my school days in FOXPRO (during 1997) and am still using it with xp.. Once Compatibility issues arise, the printer spooling problem arose.. But I solved them all and still using my a/c in Foxpro with XP without any single problem... Because I don't have FREE time NOW to change the s/w to vb+SQL or something like that.. Thanks Hitesh Ji for the info.. Edited March 12, 2010 by kanagadeepan Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
