Hard drive design leaving XP behind

Bad news for the XP diehards out there, hard drive manufacturers are tired of supporting you, and the next generation of controller technology is not going to work properly with DOS and Windows XP users. Of course it won’t be a major issue until 2011, and maybe not even then.

It’s been coming for a while now, hard drives are constantly evolving and becoming more efficient, and drive manufacturers want to be freed from the 512 byte sector size. This of course isn’t an issue for more modern operating systems like Vista or Windows 7, but XP won’t be able to handle the larger sector sizes. This of course won’t be an immediate issue, but as XP machines age and require new hard drives, we’re going to see shortages of compatible hardware. Don’t expect this to be a major issue until 2011 though, because the drive manufacturers aren’t planning on adopting the new standards until then. After that, it just depends on how long it is until your XP hard drive dies.

[via BBC News]