New drives may run slower on XP
A change to the way hard drives are formatted is likely to make for a noticeable slowdown for Windows XP users. It may mean those in the market for a new drive might be better served upgrading operating systems as well.
The International Disk Drive Equipment and Materials Association has agreed that all new drives sold from the end of January 2011 will be broken down into sectors of 4 kilobytes rather than the more common current system of 512 bytes. That’s good news for drive efficiency, but bad news for XP performance.
Each sector includes header information and an error checking code as well as the stored date itself; there’s also a gap between each sector. While that wasn’t a problem in the past, today’s larger drives mean there are considerably more sectors and thus more overall wasted space. There’s also a problem in that the 512 byte sector doesn’t really leave enough space for error checking codes to make drives as reliable as they could be.
Switching to 4 kilobyte sectors not only cuts down the amount of wasted space, but also leaves enough room for effective error checking codes. These work on a simple basis: if the machine doesn’t detect the correct code in a sector, it knows the data it’s read for that sector may also be incorrect.
Unfortunately at the time XP was developed, a decision on the 4k system was still a long way off and it only runs 512 byte sectors. This isn’t a problem with reading the new drives as XP can use emulation to simply act as if the data is in 512 byte chunks. When it comes to writing data, though, it has to adjust the data to fit into the 4k sectors.
This will cause a distinct slowdown, likely in the range of 10 percent. This won’t make machine’s useless but the slowdown will be noticeable and, at the very least, is likely to go a long way towards wiping out any benefits from upgrading a hard drive.
Of course, the real lesson is that we shouldn’t be surprised an operating system released in 2001 will be experiencing problems with the hardware of 2011. By all rights, XP should be an outdated niche product today, but that’s the result of Vista’s failures for you.
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