New 4k hard drive format to cause aging woes for Windows XP

Even though Windows 7 is the current go-to option for Windows OS’s, may people for many reasons still rely on XP day in and day out to get their work done. Being the fact that XP itself is inching towards a decade old, at some point compatibility issues will arise. And speak of the devil, a new issue is in fact cropping up. It all has to do with hard drives and hard drive formats. It’s really a pretty simple thing — new hard drives have 4k sectors, old drives (pre-Windows XP era) have 512B.

The reason for the huge jump is that back in the day, 512B sectors was perfect for 10-100GB hard drives, but now that low end drives are even pushing 500GB and top-o-the line drives are soaring up to 2TB means we need something more efficient. I say efficient because with all of those little 512b sectors required a considerable amount of extra storage space for error codes. (Even wonder why so much of your hard drive capacity magically disappears after formatting?)

That new expanded 4k sector size means more space for actual storage on new drives and overall more efficient and speedy performance. For XP users, the “fun” begins. In order for XP to use drives formatted with the new 4k size, the drive will have to emulate the old 512B sectors. For reads, their won’t be any real noticeable difference. It’s only when you get all write happy that you could see up to a 10% decrease in drive performance as the emulation mode more or less makes it so that each 1 and 0 has to be written twice. All in all, only those building custom computers with more performance oriented goals will probably notice the speed decrease.

The simple solution is again, upgrade to Windows Vista or 7. But not everyone can do that. Be warned though, whether you’re ready or not, this new format will become standard by 2011. Get ready.

BBC

[Image Source]