Time is marching on and we’re getting closer to the mainstream launch of hard drives with the new, larger, sector sizes reported earlier in the year.

Back in March it was widely reported that sector sizes on very large hard drives was being increased from 512 bytes to 4096 bytes to save administrative space on a drive and the opportunity for slightly faster drives (some interesting info here.

Windows XP, however, only understands block sizes of 512 bytes and the new drives should only work in emulation mode. Consequently, the newer drives are expected to be about 10% slower for XP users because of the extra steps needed to write information to the disk.

Yes XP has long passed it’s lifetime, but it remains the most used operating system in the world. Many, many people will still be using it ten years down the line. Indeed, we have some business customers who stick to Windows 2000 for some machines because their software continues to work (and we occasionally see some home users with Windows 98/Me machines – although *very rarely* these days).

The vast majority of business users, however, remain with Windows XP. These are also the people most likely to stick with it until a compelling reason comes along to upgrade to something else. Most often software that will only run on later versions of Windows.

The other factor with business users is that they very often don’t use a massive amount of hard drive space on their computers. It’s rare to be presented with a business machine with hundreds of photos, videos or music. Instead they often have their accounts, word and excel documents and that’s about it.

The rush to massive capacity hard drives for this market doesn’t matter a bean, except when trying to get a replacement disk. These users mostly use less than 30Gb on their disks and have no need for terabytes of space.

For that very reason it might be that the performance issue becomes a moot point. The advance of solid state disks (SSD) means that a totally new generation of faster drives is becoming available. A replacement 64Gb SSD can be bought for £80-ish and a PCI SATA card for about £15. This could be the preferred maintenance route for some businesses.

For home users, however, it’s the opposite. Often disks are crammed with videos, images and music – these are the people most likely to notice the drop in performance, but also with fewer hurdles to upgrading to later versions of Windows.

With hardware changes such as this, perhaps the main consequence will be a further split between business and home computing.