BBC: Hard drive evolution could hit Microsoft XP users

[glennda]

Just seen this Hard drive evolution could hit Microsoft XP users

 

How much of an effect do you really think its going to make until we need larger hard disk's in workstations machines - i only ever have more 160gb hard disk in the machines we buy?

 

Toby

Edited March 9, 2010 by glennda

[Mr.Ben]

Well personally we are looking at a Win7/08R2 upgrade this year because of this and a few other issues we are coming across.

 

Because of the setup of my workstations and laptops most of them only need the original 80Gb disks that came with them - only about 40GB is used with all software installed.

 

Staff Laptops have a 120GB partition on them to sync their files, and I've never seen them fill it up as they can't save video files to sync, they have a 40GB partition to do that.

 

I can see this being more of a PITA than useful for me! - I don't need terabyte disks unless they are in my servers! Will I have to buy ridiculously sized disks because they are the smallest available?

Edited March 9, 2010 by Mr.Ben

[FN-GM]

Sorry im lost at what ou are getting at.

[glennda]

do you think it is going to cause issues for newer pc's purchased after january 2011 when trying to use XP - as i can say i havn't even thort about looking to windows 7 or server 2008

 

also do you think it will affect the cost of a machine in a market that the price of machines is going up while the budgets are coming down.

 

Toby

[FN-GM]

sorry stupid mode tonight

 

I think you could slipstream drivers for the drives or add them from a floppy during setup. I would have thought this would sort it.

 

Is it a new type of formatting system ie a replacement for ntfs or a new type of drive. If it is a new formatting system i doubt XP will work at all.

 

To be honest i think people should be moving away from XP by that time anyway.

Edited March 10, 2010 by FN-GM

[maniac]

This article explains it all. It's all to do with how hard drives operate at sector level.

 

Why we need 4k drives

 

Mike.

[john]

sorry stupid mode tonight

 

I think you could slipstream drivers for the drives or add them from a floppy during setup. I would have thought this would sort it.

 

Is it a new type of formatting system ie a replacement for ntfs or a new type of drive. If it is a new formatting system i doubt XP will work at all.

 

To be honest i think people should be moving away from XP by that time anyway.

Its not drivers Zak its the way the format is run, basically there changing it and XP isn't aware of it so it will run up to 10% slower on these new drives VS the old standard. So a driver won't fix it as its the HDD.

[Arthur]

I don't need terabyte disks unless they are in my servers! Will I have to buy ridiculously sized disks because they are the smallest available?

Just because the space is there doesn't mean you have to use it.

 

There are other benefits to bigger HDDs. Higher aerial density means faster read/write speeds. Surely a good thing given HDDs are the slowest part of a PC? Over the course of a year, I reckon I waste weeks of my life waiting for computers to do stuff (mainly due to slow HDDs, but also slow processors too). The difference between a modern disk (such as the Samsung SpinPoint F3 or Hitachi Deskstar 7K1000.C) and a HDD from 5-6 years ago is like night and day.

[sidewinder]

MS must be rubbing their hands with glee, could scare some people into upgrading to 7

[glennda]

I be honest i don't the manufactures are not going to be changing the format of the smaller HDDs i think you will find that it will only be the Larger 320/500/750/1tb disks that will be affected which is really only going to be servers where it affects us as most of our pc's have 160 gb hard disks - as they are saying xp it will probly also affect server 2k3.

[CHR1S]

Its a non issue really, anyone who at the point of release who a) Still Uses XP and b) Requires this sort of HDD space and doesnt understand the implications is asking for it.

 

Most people when the HDD fills up either buys an external HDD and moves stuff there or buys a new PC which in turn has Vista/7.

[PiqueABoo]

so it will run up to 10% slower on these new drives

 

I expect that might effectively just wipe out the performance increase you get from the AF drives i.e. you will be where you would be without the performance increase of AF? I did read a review with benchmarks somewhere a while back that reckoned the performance was the same on a WD(?) AF drive with their XP 512 byte compatibility jumper in place.

 

Sloppy reporting. All in all I think the correct response is probably ::shrug::

[apoth0r]

It's been done before, we all know the restrictions of FAT / FAT32, it's just the next stage from that. Instead of restrictions in space we are looking at improvements before the event arises. Glad it's ahead of it's time for a change