As a warning, it’s not all that dire, but it is a wake-up call for Windows XP users--newer hardware just might make your XP life a bit less comfortable. In this case, hard drives coming out starting January 2011 will have a new formatting standard that will make them less compatible with XP, and will result in performance slowdowns.
It’s a change that makes sense, and is probably long overdue. The current formatting standard for hard drives is a legacy from floppy disks--formatting in blocks of 512 bytes. This makes for a lot of wasted hard drive space, when error correction and block gaps are tallied in. Given the amount of space that can be wasted on a 1TB drive with 512 byte blocks, it’s time for a change.
Full Story:
http://www.maximumpc.com/article/news/new_hard_drives_may_force_xp_users_upgrade_7
