Windows XP will Have Issues with Advanced Format HDD's

[Rob Williams]

By early 2011, all hard drives produced will begin featuring a technology called "Advanced Format", which reduces the drive's overhead by moving the sector sizes from 512b to 4Kb. The benefit is that less space inside the drive will be hogged by ECC blocks, and it will ultimately result in more available storage on a given hard drive, up to 7-11% more. It might even increase performance, and decrease power consumption, but that's yet to be seen.

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You can read the rest of our post here.

 

[Yangster]

How does this affect external hard drives? Can I use it as an external for XP? Or will it still have problems?

 

[Rob Williams]

That's a great question, and one I'm not even sure on. If I had to guess, there would be issues, because at the end of the day, it's still a regular hard drive. I don't think there would be an issue with using one of these newer drives in an external enclosure, but XP might have issues dealing with it.

I'll ask WD about this and see what I can find out.

 

[Psi*]

Thanks for the alert as this is just the kind of change that might really screw with external drives to use as backups, sneaker nets ... or any reason to move any drive from one computer to another.

I suspect that this is an absolute necessity with TB drives ... or at least quite an influence.

 

[Yangster]

Mmm thanks. I was shopping for a new harddrive recently and noticed WD has two forms now, EADS and EARS and I think one of the reviews for the EARS mentioned something like this. It seems the newer version is cheaper than the old one tho.

 

[Agent L]

All advanced format drives today do emulation in hardware, so in fact they pretend to have old, 512 byte sectors. So all operating system ever concieved will be compatible. Issue discussed here is 100% OS independent, because they all access all drives in same way.

As long as drive is partioned with ADF aware tool or treated once with WDAlign, it's 100% OK on XP

Yangster, the issue is unrelated to the connection method. External drives have same problem. And the solution is to partition it first under newer Win or run WDAlign.
Just as a side note, WDAlign does nothing fancy, just shifts data into sweet spots. So emptier the partition is, there is less data to move and whole operation goes faster.
Once correct partition(s) is(are) created, there is nothing to worry about ever again. You can create and delete files, and they'll always stay in align.

Regards, mates, it's sad that oridinary folks like us has to straighten up panic raised by BBC. Anyone smells Bill's dirty fingers trying to force upgrading XP?

 

[b1lk1]

By next year MS will stop actively working on XP. By 2014 XP will be deader than Win 98. It's not forced upgrading, it is reality. They sold a retail product and area not wanting to deal with it anymore since it is old, outdated and ready for the grave.

People can keep clutching their copies of XP to their hearts but reality is what reality is. XP needs to be put behind us as noone can deny 7 is better and as far as I am concerned Vista is vastly superior to XP as well.

 

[Optix]

Any idea if a firmware update or other method would allow older drives to have this feature? If it does give back more drive space and were to give a boost to performance I'd be all for it.

 

[killem2]

By next year MS will stop actively working on XP. By 2014 XP will be deader than Win 98. It's not forced upgrading, it is reality. They sold a retail product and area not wanting to deal with it anymore since it is old, outdated and ready for the grave.

People can keep clutching their copies of XP to their hearts but reality is what reality is. XP needs to be put behind us as noone can deny 7 is better and as far as I am concerned Vista is vastly superior to XP as well.

I'm wondering what happens to the business sectors that are still on xp pro

 

[Agent L]

Any idea if a firmware update or other method would allow older drives to have this feature? If it does give back more drive space and were to give a boost to performance I'd be all for it.

From WD announcements, it's not going to happen. It might not be technically possible (had to be pre-implemented as an option in older drives), and it doesn't make much sense from business point of view either.
Considerable expense for producer in form of development effort AND lot's of bad mouth from ppl who were too dumb to read readme and lost their precious pr0n collections. Pros? Just few % more space. For those few who already had free terrabytes to backup first. (unlikely any drive would work simultaneously on 512 and 4096 byte sectors)

This technology is more of a convenience to HDD makers, not any breakthrough from a customer point of view. As the panic rising gossip shows, sometimes even an inconvenience. That's why WD is slipping it in silently under the kitchen door of Green Power lineup.

 

[b1lk1]

I'm wondering what happens to the business sectors that are still on xp pro

Any business still stuck on XP's tit by 2014 deserves what they get although I am sure MS will be less likely to end all help to business. Retail is what will be officially ended first.