I think whoever buys a new HDD in 2011 won't be using XP anymore anyway. It already is in extended support, and support will end 2014. Won't we almost have the W8 beta by then ;-)

But even if someone is in need of a new HDD by 2011 and wants to keep the rest of the PC including OS, it sounds like the new drives still can "pretend" to be 512 byte drives (possibly with slower speed or capacity, but probably faster than what they will replace). Whoever has an XP PC now, probably has an at least 3 year old PC, by 2011 it is 4+ years. Little likely to keep it then if a new HDD is needed. With new HDD most people install the OS new to have a fresh install. That is a good time to upgrade to W7.

I'm also thinking some of the older HDD still will be on sale for a while.

I can't remember pretty well, but I think you can costumize WinXP to run on a 32k sector size HDD. You'll need to have a seperate boot partition with a Vista/7 bcd- IF I remember it right. :P

arkhi said:

I can't remember pretty well, but I think you can costumize WinXP to run on a 32k sector size HDD. You'll need to have a seperate boot partition with a Vista/7 bcd- IF I remember it right. :P

One probably can manipulate it that way. but is that easier than installing W7? since XP over time gets slower (BTW, W7 in my case doesn't seem to get slower over time) one would do a clean install anyway. After owning W7 I re-installed XP on a laptop (that I use in the living room for TV web usage since the laptop display is broken) and installing all the drivers is a pain. I recently upgraded from wireless to Cat6 and had to trouble-shoot to install the network card driver to make it work. I almost bought another copy of W7 just for that. XP really was great - in its time.

I'm still surprised how many PCs/laptops still are for sale with XP and vista. I kind of get it that someone keeps what he already has (and paid for) and makes it work somehow. But buying new license of an old OS with a new machine? Especially since support for both XP and Vista will end / has ended? Or are those just still on sale from last year since no one buys them? The support for most Vistas ends in 2012 and XP is on extended support already outliving some of the Vista versions, go figure!

@above
I meant it for people who still want to stick with XP, since the problem XP has is it can't boot from diffrently-sized sectors HDD, so the workaround would be to use a Win7/Vista BCD :P

On the general note, no, it's not easier than installing Windows 7, but these are for people who want to stick to the old.

iseeuu said:

I couldn't find where anyone had posted this link, sorry if I missed it ...

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 here: By Mark Ward, technology correspondent, BBC News

"advanced format" and this would be what exactly?

motc7;

As I understand things in a non-technical way: the first storage media (for PC) was a 5 1/4" floppy (I still have quite a collection of them). It could store 512KB of data (in blocks of 512 bytes). Next the 3.5" Floppy, 1.4MB, but the data was still stored in blocks of 512 bytes. My first hard drive was 40MB and used the same blocks of 512 bytes to store data. With the much larger hard drives of today, this ancient file system wastes a lot of space.

I try to envision a hard drive as a room, a square room with no windows and one door. I could throw papers into the room until there was a pile in the center ... not very productive. I could stack papers from the floor to the ceiling, better use of space, but hard to find that one piece of paper when needed. So I fill the room with file cabinets and organize my papers by file drawer, and file folder. Very efficient for locating a specific piece of paper. However, a lot of room is taken up by the file cabinets themselves. And even if I had 20 file folders in one file drawer, if each folder only had one piece of paper in it, all the unused space in that drawer is wasted.

So it is a 1TB hard drive will have 930GB of available space after the file system is in place. And fragmented data will cause more space to be unavailable.

Western Digital reported it had developed a file system based on "4kb sectors" instead of the "512 byte sector" currently in use. The problem is that a new hard drive capable of understanding the new file system is required. Trying to put one of these new hard drives in an old OS (XP, 2K, 98) may cause problems. Once the market has sold out of the current hard drive types (both new and used), owners of older computers and older OSs may find it even more difficult to cling to their favorite, if not ancient software.

I found this thread from December here: WD format provides "free" 11% extra storage

Also reported in the article: "Hard drive makers have begun an education and awareness campaign..." I for one would like to know if they would care to make a presentation to the members of Windows Seven Forums? I would like to know how the new file format could impact Windows 7 users like myself.

Cheers!

Up until sata most IDE HDs had a jumper for "2Gig" mode so that OSes thatcould not handle drive sizes greater than 2 gig could still use the drive, even thoug hthe drive may be 500gig in size!

As mentioned above, if this really were to become a problem, I think the drive manufacturers would put a jumper on there to mimic 512k mode, even if it meant limiting the total drive size, and/or write their own drivers to handle the new drive format (Remember they drive overlay stuff from the Win9x days?!? )