"Hard drive evolution could hit Microsoft XP users"

[Arthur]

News for Windows XPers:

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.

... more

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[PeterCH]

Western Digital has already solved this problem. I'm sure other makers will too, to keep on selling drives to WinXP users.

The good news is, Western Digital has already solved the problem. Those of you who want to use an AF drive in Windows XP can either install a hardware jumper (if you plan to use a single, simple partition) or run a software tool called WDAlign. Either solution will restore the drive's full write performance, but WDAlign is what you'll need to use if you've created multiple partitions on a single disk. For our test, we compared the performance of a Caviar Black 1TB (32MB cache, 7200 RPM), and an Advanced Format Caviar Green 1TB (64MB cache, 5400RPM) in 32-bit Windows XP. The Caviar Green was tested both properly aligned and unaligned to highlight the impact of not using WDAlign or setting the requisite jumper.

http://hothardware.com/Articles/WDs...vanced-Format-Windows-XP-Users-Pay-Attention/

 

[ponder]

It's not much of an issue really.