[ale] OT "1 step forward, 2 steps back"

[Preston Boyington]

Michael Trausch wrote:
> On Mon, 2010-05-17 at 14:48 -0500, Preston Boyington wrote:
>> mmm... not sure about that.  while I haven't used Win7, someone 
>> mentioned that it had some kind of VM way of doing 'compatibility
>> mode'.
>>
>> I would be concerned about the hardware compatibility with
>> modern/near 
>> future with WinXP* if people are thinking about a unit to upgrade
>> over 
>> the next few years.
>>
>> *from cursory reading it seems that hard drives and other parts will
>> not 
>> (purposely) be compatible with XP. 
> 
> Huh?  Are you referring to the 4K-sector drives?  If so, they're
> compatible.  They just require a bit of extra effort to properly align
> partitions since the drives show (by default) 512-byte virtual sectors,
> which makes it possible to misalign 4K clusters (the default, if memory
> serves, with NTFS), which should be aligned with 4K sectors.
> 
> Even then, it's not incompatible.  All having misaligned clusters or
> filesystem blocks means is that when a cluster or a filesystem block is
> written to the disk, the drive will have to read 2 sectors, modify both
> of them, and then write them both to disk, instead of just writing a
> single sector.  The read-modify-write will obviously incur a significant
> cost under high loads.
> 

ah, gotcha.  the article I read a few months back said 'incompatible' 
and I didn't read much more after that since it also mentioned that 
Linux and newer operating systems have been covered since September of 
2009 (or thereabout).

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