Topic: Hard drive evolution could hit Microsoft XP users

[Clive]

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.

FULL STORY

[Simon]

To help Windows XP cope, advanced format drives will be able to pretend they still use sectors 512 bytes in size.  When reading data from a drive this emulation will go unnoticed. However, said Mr Burks, in some situations writing data could hit performance.  In some cases the drive will take two steps to write data rather than one and introduce a delay of about 5 milliseconds.

 

[sam]

trust me that's a huge time when dealing with immense data... probably not a problem for you windows users though.

[Simon]

[Rik]

You haven't seen some of the ping complaints we get on Netters, Sam.

[sam]

ping complaints?

Oh we spent a whole afternoon pinging our server in the DMZ with no luck the other day, stupid network switches managing connections when they aren't supposed to.

[Rodders]

In ten years time there won't be any moving parts in storage devices.  SSD is the future.

[sam]

In ten years time there won't be any moving parts in storage devices.  SSD is the future.

better be otherwise we won't be able to build this: http://www.skatelescope.org/video/SKA_Animation_2010.wmv

[Rik]

How long would it take to re-paint that lot, Sam?

[sam]

too long. They wont be painted I wouldn't have thought - they will be made of some composite material

[Rik]

How much reflectivity do the dishes need to have?

[sam]

not sure of the spec off my head but they need to be pretty high.  I'm more of a software person.