Ron Schenone

Still Using Windows XP? You May Wish To Buy A Hard Disk Before 01/31/11

Posted by on Mar 11, 2010 | One Comment

Hard disk are about to go through the biggest update in more than 30 years, and the change will take place on or near January 31, 2011. Hard disks currently use a 512 byte sectors for storing data which made sense when hard disks were small. But with drivers reaching into the 1,000 MB and larger, it is time to change to a 4 byte sector, known as advanced format.

Most of the newer operating systems can read the advanced format and they include the following:

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

But it is this one statement you should be aware of:

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.

The hard disks will emulate 512 byte sectors, but I personally believe that using a hard disk that supports 512 bytes may be preferable. I would recommend buying a hard disk before the change happens just to be safe. Of course this may force some to make the switch to a newer OS.

Comments welcome.

Source

  • http://wp3.lockergnome.com/nexus/theoracle/ the oracle

    The move to larger sectors is something that we all knew was coming, and clearly Microsoft knew. They could have put the code into Windows XP, or 2000, because the powers that be knew of the change back then (in the last century, ha-ha).

    The problem is that the performance hit is not something we know the extent of yet. There are reports of 230% slowing, in certain instances, but then the drives being shown are faster than many purchased during the heyday of Windows XP. Something else to think about is the fact that the only problem is in writes, not reads.

    The alignment tool from Western Digital is said to ameliorate much of the problem, and to be clear, whether or not it is used, there will be no data losses. Another thing is, all the drives currently shipping (as of a check on Newegg this AM) have the WD mark on them, and each of them has a 64MB cache, twice what other manufacturers are offering on similar (but 512k sector) drives. The fact that WD drives are already fast, and have (in my opinion) the best caching algorithm of any extant, means that many will probably never know the difference.

    I need to buy a new drive for a machine that will be running Windows XP until at least 2014. I was going to buy a Samsung, because they are the hottest in terms of bang for the buck at 1 TB. I think now that so much has been made of this, I’ll be buying a WD, and if there are problems, I can swap the drive to a Windows 7 machine, and put one of the Samsung 1 TB drives I own into it instead.

    I’m betting I won’t notice much difference, and I’m fairly sensitive to these things. ( I have great faith in the extra speed of the WD drives, and the caching mechanism.)