Officially, Microsoft has confirmed that the Windows XP end of life date will be in 2014 and until that date, Microsoft will continue to release security patches for the XP operating system. By 2014, a significant number of users will have already upgraded from XP to Windows 7, but there will be many that will remain on the older OS until support has terminated. We have seen this in the past with other Microsoft operating systems as well.

However, a recent report from the BBC appears to indicate that upcoming hard drive technology that could be available as early as 2011 may force XP users to upgrade if and when their hard drives fail. Since the days of the DOS operating system, formatted hard drives came with blocks that were 512 bytes in size. Back then, hard drives were small and so a smaller block size was not an issue.

Today, large hard drives are common with 1TB drives and up seeming to be the standard. With the larger sizes, maintaining a smaller 512 byte sector is inefficient resulting in wasted space due to the requirement of a small gap between sectors. As such, hard drive technology will adopt a new standard of 4k sector sizes which amounts to eight times less wasted space.

Operating systems such as Windows 7, Vista, OS X Tiger, Leopard, Snow Leopard all function normally with the 4k sector size, but XP was released before the 4k sector size was finalized and hence is not compatible. There is some discussion currently underway to have the new hard drives emulate or pretend to use 512 sector sizes so that XP works correctly. The only issue with this is XP users will notice a slow down in write speeds which could make “a drive 10% slower.”

Via: BBC, Gadget Venue