Reports are that users of Windows XP, who would be looking to upgrade their hard-drives during the coming year, might just end up slowing their systems down a bit, probably by somewhere around 10%. The reason seems to be that starting January 2011; hard drive manufacturers would have to shift to "Advanced Format" drives, which is the first ever significant change in some 30 years.

Since the start of HDDs, drives have been formatted into sectors of 512-byte, exactly like the floppies that came right before them. While this is alright for modest file sizes and megabyte drives, times today are different when terabyte drives and huge files are the norm.

The 512-byte sectors end up wasting a lot of space, and the only problem is not the space that is wasted between each sector, but each of these also end up using 40 bytes for ECC, or Error Correction Codes.

The major problem with XP is that it is built on an "expectation of 512-byte sectors", and while the Advanced Format drives will be able to imitate the format was has been prevalent, doing this would end up slowing the platform by some 10%.