Hard drive evolution could hit Microsoft XP users
 

Hard drive evolution could hit Microsoft XP users

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.

Read the full Article here.

Compliments to jk2447 for the find :)

-Ken

perhaps i should write an article about how World of Warcraft refuses to work with my Windows 95 system which also refuses to work with my new fiber router or something?

oh but wait, that wouldnt suprise anybody would it?

apparently the 10 year old OS not working with brand new hardware is surprising people, if only we had gone to EFI or something then XP users could suck it

This.

Plus, what HDD manufacturers are saying isn't that it won't work but that there may be a performance hit. The truth is even with a 10% performance hit when writing to the drive its still a whole ****e load faster than HDD were when XP was released.

Ryan, Horde or Alliance?

Sorry gentlemen, maybe I'm missing the point, but why would a general user or even an average desktop support person know the newer generation of hard drives won't work or will cause a reduction in performance on XP? Unless an article like this comes out ahead of time and propagates through the likes of us.

A ridiculous amount of companies are going to keep XP as their client OS for a ridiculous amount of time IMHO. In 2011 when a HDD fails and a new one is ordered, why would you think "hang on, is that a 4k drive?" You probably haven't wondered that in the last 8 1/2 years.

Just my opinion of course

James

Same reason the guy who owns the 10 year old Audi knows it might not have / support all the cool **** in a 2010 model


Users are not as thick as we like to often treat them
in fact, plenty of users I know replace entire systems when they get a bit too slow
users who don't notice that slowdown often don't replace, chances of them doing anything fancy is pretty slim though!

In fact, a user thick enough to get a single component upgraded 10 years after the OS went life is likely taking it to a dealer, who should not be thick, and who should provide appropriate pre-sales counsel to the users about the likelihood of issues from the upgrade and make suggestions

They wouldn't. It is still interesting to know though. I'm still using XP at the moment, but am eying up a switch to Windows 7, just got to get a bit more memory.

And they will get a ridiculous level of support
Windows XP is out of mainstream support (yeah yeah if you have the right SP theres a little life left!)
Extended support only now, which costs money! companies hate spending money

any company governed by security regulations will get in crap as soon as security patches stop too, because they will fail audits, which are expensive things to fail!

The simple fact is, the upgrade is imminent, its going to happen, and the tools and technology are in place to make it painless in a lot of cases, it just requires proper planning
budgetary wise, supporting systems no longer supported by the manufacturer jump the OpEx costs up so high it pretty much covers the CapEx for upgrades!

Should be a none issue. The people who aren't smart enough to take this into consideration shouldn't be smart enough to even need to bother with it i.e. when they need a new computer or something inside their current hard drive breaks, they either buy a whole new computer or they'll take it to a shop to fix it. If you're smart enough to swap a hard drive out and reinstall Windows, this thought of thing shouldn't be a problem.

Very good points and seeing as you are in Pre-sales, you'll certainly know more than I. What I wanted to get across was that there are going to be a lot of people who won't know why a 4k drive isn't working or is slower on XP. I say that because as the article says, since HDD's came out, its never been an issue so for what? 20+ years its been a standard 512 bytes as we all knew. To a lot of people, a hard drive is a hard drive with various speeds and interfaces but essentially the same from a users perspective.

Admittedly tho, you advise companies on requirements for a living so its looking likely I should stop debating now. . .

Being smart has nothing to do with this. Just because some people may not know one end of a computer from another doesn't automatically make them stupid.

Who calls Microsoft for support? :biggrin

It doesn't make them stupid but if they're not smart enough to replace a hard drive, this update to hard drives shouldn't be an issue for them as they'll leave it in someone's hands that do know a lot more about computers. Someone who does know how to swap a hard drive, format it and reinstall Windows, i'd expect to be able to look at this update and make the appropriate decision on which direction to go i.e. update to Windows Vista/7 or to go for an older 512k hard drive.

No foul in debating mate
your right, HDDs have not changed for the longest amount of time, BUT, people at the level generally are not buying components, and if they are, they should have a clue, the issue arises when people in the industry who are supposed to know whats going on, don't, and your right, that will happen an awful lot!
but its not something the industry should make a huge fuss over, idiots just need to get fired ;)

As soon as you get into the SAN world and array world, the numbers change anyway, as your really not dealing with the set in stone 512byte stuff anymore, can play with block sizes, stripe sizes, a bunch of other things come into play really

XP needs to go away, its a huge industry overhead

Really? Amazing... it doesn't cause me any overhead! :biggrin

Thanks for this comment Phoenix, I appreciate it. I think I'll leave SAN's to you Pre sales and Storage Analysts! The little I had to do with HDS disks made me realise how little I knew! (finding that a lot lately:rolleyes:)

Just corrected that there for you Ryan. XP is perfectly fine - there's absolutely zero compelling reason for me to waste money on a desktop rollout of Win 7 when it doesn't offer me a damn thing that XP doesn't.

I'm also not particularly fond of spending money on training my users to use a new O/S (most of them still can't tell the difference between 'log off' and 'shut down' after using computers for ten years).

Finally, you mentioned earlier that companies 'don'#t like spending money' and used that as a justification for upgrading because they wouldn't want to spend money on a support call to Windows. I've never made a single call to PSS in my working life - so I think 'saving money' for me would involve utilising the perfectly good OS, on perfectly good two year old hardware, for at least another two years.

Now don't get me wrong here, I think Win7 is wicked cool - have been using it since March last year, and installed it the day it was available on my VLK at work, but can anyone give me one single reason why I'd want to spend money (when we workshopped the possibility about two months ago with the finance department when we were budgeting we estimated a desktop refresh to Win7 standard would cost us around £250k-£275k) on an upgrade to WIn7 for the average lUser?

Its probably the sales man in him taking over! I'd be glad if he worked for us! As of next week I'll be working on a contract with 85 thousand nodes so I know for a fact we will squeeze every drop of life out of those XP clients. Even if we had to bring in a team of developers and specialists its still a drop in the ocean compared to a full refresh

Stuart, your exactly right, the majority of migrations I am seeing are not in the realm of 'two year old hardware' though, we are talking about finally getting away from 5+ year old hardware, managed in 90s fashion, running a 9 year old operating system in a 90s fashion!

few administrators measure up to your caliber, meaning few networks and systems have the thought and foresight going into their design and maintenance, these are the cases where XP is a nightmare, and Win7 with some decent back end management improvements could really make a difference

certainly you could buy 7 and roll back, I guess the point is 'why' i could see the compelling reason to do it from Vista, but 7 is robust, it works, and the vendors have finally caught up so stuff works! i don't go around insisting people do refreshes if they don't need to, but if they were to do one and went with XP I would walk away, there is very little business value buying a new desktop/thinclient, paying for 7 anyway, then downgrading to XP just because thats how you have done it for 9 years

I can't imagine you would disagree there :)

Some reasons I am seeing (and these are not all at ONE company so don't think my clients are all just bleeding edge, but various clients are using various features here)

Direct Access - Seriously, see this in action, love it, built on IPv6 tech too!
Branch Cache in Distributed mode, lots of remote sites in places like Idaho, some of which have a handful of users, considerably cheaper than rolling out a Riverbed/WAAS solution to a tiny site
Med-V - XP mode but managed at the enterprise level, nice!
It's supported! - seriously, to most enterprises, that's rather important
It's considerably more secure - you can do a ton to XP to MAKE it secure, but it will never be what Vista and 7 are
UAC - techies hate it, but i've seen it save a lot of peoples butts a lot of the time!

It's finally a platform worth upgrading to, its secure, its robust, and it doesn't perform the way many people found vista to perform, is it worth 300k GBP? that's down to whatever metrics you measure against and the write off period of the investment, but I'm seeing a lot of clients turn around to me and say 'Yes'

Make no mistake, my role may encompass a large portion of presales type work, but i'm ultimatly a solutions architect, that means I spend the majority of my time looking at business needs and reasons, and fit technology and vendors that meet those needs, something my sales people hate (I don't lead with whatever vendor pays them the most)

This is far cry form when i was a red blooded tech, and all i cared about was 'cool shineys'

Please to be giving you very good helpings today, tanjewberrymud.

:eek:

I once had cause to call for activation of Win XP twice in the space of one day, once around lunchtime when this was the voice at the end of the phone and once after 5pm when apparently the call centre had moved....





.... to Wales.

Wow that was a fast move :D

ahhahahahh! :p "My name is 'Adam', how can I to be helping you today?" Adam... riiiiiight... :rolleyes:

Just quickly,

Is the MS Volume Licensing Advisor working for anyone else?

http://www.microsoft.com/uk/licensin...0/default.mspx

whats REALLY funny is when they try and be clever and get your location from your IP and ask you how the weather is in 'someplaceyournot' think they have stopped that for the most part as it backfires so often LOL

We used to joke about the 'crackle button'.
MS would generally transfer you half way round the world on the pretext of 'passing you over to my colleague who very helping you with this technical issue. Tanjew for calling.'

You would eventually get through to the guy who was apparently the oracle of whichever subject you were asking about, at which point the line would disintigrate into static and you'd be reduced to bellowing down the phone while the guy answered as quietly as he could.

You'd put the phone down and say 'I'm not going through all that again!'

Which I imagine is the whole point...

I also had a classic conversation with a young lad on the switchboard at the MS office in Reading.

ME: 'Can you put me through to the complaints department please?'
HIM: 'I'm sorry, we don't actually have a complaints department.' (CUNNING, Microsoft, cunning!)
ME: 'Well, who can I speak to if I've got a complaint?'
HIM: (puzzled silence. A complaint? Surely not.) 'Well, it would depend on what the complaint was regarding.'
ME: 'Software licensing.'
HIM: 'That would be the licensing department.'
ME: 'Great, can you put me through to them?'
HIM: 'Sure, what's it regarding?'
ME: (not sure if he's taking the piss) 'I've got a complaint to make.'
HIM: 'I'm sorry, they don't handle complaints in that department.'

I suppose it's one way to keep your customer satisfaction stats up...

:rolleyes:

I live near reading, I'm more than happy for my complaints department to talk to theirs if you like!

http://www.share-winning.com/xiaoyi/...4034533466.jpg