
Why new hard disks might not be much fun for XP users - terpua
http://arstechnica.com/microsoft/news/2010/03/why-new-hard-disks-might-not-be-much-fun-for-xp-users.ars?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=rss
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jister
As an XP user, I don't really care about those "features" or whatever I am
missing. I am just happy to be able to surf the internet using IE6 and use MS
Office for my everyday work. I occasionally play games on FaceBook and use
Twitter to tell friends about what I am doing....

\- average user -

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MikeCapone
That was probably accurate until you got to Twitter. The average user probably
isn't on Twitter (based on recent Twitter surveys that were posted on HN).

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chrisbolt
I think by now XP users are used to not having much fun. Your operating system
is _ten years old!_ The average hard drive was 40GB when it was released!

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barrkel
If you measure fun as negative frustration, I had a lot more fun with XP than
I ever have had with Windows 7. XP was so familiar it melted into the
background, and incompatibilities were non-existent. Windows 7 has moved
everything around and introduced nothing of value to me personally - my
preference would be for XP shell, control panel layout etc. with the Windows 7
kernel and system libraries.

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donaq
Articles such as these illustrate why I think humankind has hope. Wresting
signal from noise. The triumph of will and intellect over chaos.

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bartl
I think vendors should not hold back, but start selling those 4k disks now. So
XP users won't buy them, if they know what they're doing...

But it might be a compelling reason for people to upgrade their OS, if disks
for their OS are smaller and/or more expensive than the new 4k ones.

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ableal
Quote about current situation:

 _Typical consumer grade hard drives have a target of one unreadable bit for
every 10^14 read from disk (10^14 bits is about 12 TB, so if you have six 2 TB
disks in an array, that array probably has an error on it);_

That's an error unrecoverable by the hardware, passed to the system software -
if it hits an encrypted or compressed archive, with no ECC itself, the whole
bundle of data is corrupted. Photos, music, movies, etc. probably fare better.

The article does not specify if the 10^14 number is going up in the new
hardware. If not ...

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zandorg
My take on this when a friend mentioned it was: I don't need a new hard drive
to run XP, and I mainly use external USB drives anyway.

