Hard drive evolution could hit Microsoft XP users

[CK_John]

Source: By Mark Ward technology correspondent, BBC News

Hard drives are about to undergo one of the biggest format shifts in 30 years.

By early 2011 all hard drives will use an "advanced format" that changes how they go about saving the data people store on them.

The move to the advanced format will make it easier for hard drive makers to produce bigger drives that use less power and are more reliable.

However, it might mean problems for Windows XP users who swap an old drive for one using the changed format.

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

---

Major disruption for the benefit of a very few who actually need large storage drives.

[Warpy]

1. Meh. I've saved all the drives from dead computers

and if I've recycled them to charity, I've done so with new hard drives and pristine software. I won't be hurting for replacement hard drives for a decade.

As for making them bigger, I still have an old Win 95 box with a 6 gig HD that is 2/3 empty. Once CDRW drives came out, there was no reason to keep a HD cluttered with anything that could be transferred.

[TrogL]

14. I've got a usb connector that lets me access any kind of drive

Works in windows 7

I'm getting data off 10 year old drives that I thought was lost forever

[Warpy]

18. I've got an HD dock that lets me do the same

There doesn't seem to be much rhyme or reason as to what will work on Win7 and what won't, though, so I've gotten a refurbished XP box for the stuff that won't.

[roguevalley]

20. I wish you two lived near to me to tell me how to salvage three

harddrives I have that include pictures of my deceased parents. *SOB!*

[Festivito]

25. It's not hard to retrieve. If you have no geeky friends, try a small store.

They'd transfer it for fifty bucks. Even less. Buy a computer from them and make it part of the sale to transfer to the new one.

There are simply too many ways to do this to describe here. Worry not.

[Mayberry Machiavelli]

2. I'm sure Microsoft will benefit a lot by selling a bunch of Windows 7 licenses.

[CRF450]

27. IIRC, there are kits and software available that can transfer software..

From one hard drive, to another.

[w4rma]

3. This will only cause problems for new installs of XP. (nt)

[Cassandra]

4. Well, my XP died in November...

and I bought a Win7 with a 1T drive. Although I miss the XP interface with photos, I really needed the extra storage over the 160G I had.

[WCGreen]

22. I've been running my XP machine in Safe Mode for almost a year now...

[aaronbav]

30. Why? What happened and why are you having to use Safe Mode?

[WCGreen]

33. I have no idea.

I have tried everything. So I need the data and can access it and email it to my other machine.

I think the program was corrupted somehow.

[Raineyb]

24. I just dropped a new hard drive in my XP machine after the old one

crapped out on me. It's hard enough finding a IDE hard drive these days.

:shrug:

160G is fine on that machine. The Vista machine has 600G. And there's always the external push come to shove.

[tridim]

5. Minor issue IMO

If the new format really means less power and more reliability, make the change.

[SkyDaddy7]

10. Thank-you!

[bc3000]

6. Western Digital AF drives have a jumper to change to mitigate performance issues.

http://hothardware.com/Articles/WDs-1TB-Caviar-Green-w-Advanced-Format-Windows-XP-Users-Pay-Attention/

So, yeah, read the instructions before you install it. If setting a jumper is beyond your skills you shouldn't be replacing a hard drive anyway.

There's always linux (I recommend trying Linux Mint) and since XP's 64 bit support blows, many people are going to want to upgrade to Windows 7 to be able to use more RAM anyway. I know I am.

[Mr. Sparkle]

7. It would be nice of microsoft to write an update since they must have made billions off Xp.

but realistically i wont hold my breadth.

[cliffordu]

8. Anything that shows the M$ operating systems for the pure crapola they are

is worth supporting...Gimme a load o' large hard drives!!!

[drm604]

9. Overall a minor problem.

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.

[Tempest]

11. Non-issue

Existing computers with XP that require a new hard drive will still have 512K sector drives available. And they'll be cheaper.

New computers for consumers with the new hard drives will come with Windows 7 pre-installed.

Companies who continue to use XP until Windows 7 matures (which is the majority of companies and the federal government) will still be able to get new computers with 512K sector drives through their vendors.

[Arkana]

12. I'll have replaced my computer by then anyway.

[Socal31]

13. Time to hop off of the XP train if you plan on buying new hardware.

[MilesColtrane]

15. Solid State Drive technology is advancing rapidly.

1 terabyte SSDs the size of a postage stamp are expected in 2012.

http://www.physorg.com/news185438129.html

And SSD prices will continue to fall.

I'm waiting for my Atomic Holographic Optical drive which will store 12.2 petabytes per cubic centimeter.

http://colossalstorage.net/home_diskdrive.htm

[Greyhound]

21. Exactly, The HDD is a walking dinosaur and spending significant resources

"modernizing" to a new format for an obsolete technology is just another squeeze from the manufacturers and their minions.

There will remain specific applications where this old tech is sufficient and the quantity of data makes conversion impractical, but by and large, the immediate future is the SSD.

[CRF450]

26. Not to mention they're one of the biggest bottlenecks in a pc's performance

They are crazy expensive, but unless I can find one that 300+ gigs and less than $300 for my laptop, I'm not buying one. 256gb solid state drives are going for $700 to $800!

[EOTE]

31. Newegg has a 64 gig model for $144 shipped now.

I know that's probably not sufficient for your needs, but I plan on getting one a piece for my desktop and laptop. For my desktop, I've already got about a terabyte in other hard drives that I'll use for the bulk of my storage, but having an SSD for my boot drive will give me a nice performance bump. I've already had an SSD in my laptop and the performance difference is astounding. When I put in the SSD for good, I'll just use one of my external HDs for backing up all my overflow.

[Initech]

23. I'd love to get an SSD for my laptop but the cost of those things right now is ridiculous.

[IDemo]

34. I'm working in the SSD R&D lab of a major player

The world's fastest drive (SATA 3, 6Gb/s) was recently released, with more to come:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dqnL3jX3dik&feature=related

[jeff47]

16. Tip: Read the entire article before posting

Quoting the article you linked:

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.

[CK_John]

29. Article was posted via DU copyright rules of no more than 4 paragraphs for LBN.

[hunter]

17. It's still pretty damned primitive.

Ideally an OS wouldn't have to know anything about the internal structure of a hard drive. The hard drive itself would be a database engine and the OS would simply query it. We're already multiple layers of abstraction away from the raw sector/track model of the floppy disk. Modern hard drives have capacities of terabytes, not a megabytes, yet we are still talking about sectors and tracks. This is absurd.

It's long past time to throw away this entire rat's nest and start fresh. Unfortunately we are in a place where software patents and competing corporate giants are obstructing technical progress and innovation.

[Ian David]

19. I still have my old Mac/SE and its hard drive in my garage. n/t

[pnorman]

28. Offhand, it sounds good to me.

"Each 512 byte sector has a marker showing where it begins and an area dedicated to storing error correction codes. In addition a tiny gap has to be left between each sector. In large drives this wasted space where data cannot be stored can take up a significant proportion of the drive.

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."

I am NOT "anti-Luddite"; there were good reasons rooted in Social Justice for most of the actions of the original Luddites. But I'm NOT a knee-jerk Luddite!

[backscatter712]

32. The new drives will have a compatibility mode.

They can pretend to have 512 byte blocks, but this mode could cause performance problems.

In other words, Windows XP can still use these drives, but they'll be a bit slower.