The final throes before solid takes over? 😀

Everything must change I suppose. There will still be plenty of "older" hard drives around for the future. And by 2020, DOSBox should reach v1.0. 😁

They are talking about an emulation mode for 512-byte sectors, so there will be a performance penalty at most.

Heh, even Windows 7 is affected. 😁

if this means no more pc clones them im happy, i always had problems with clones.

lightmaster, that's utter nonsense. You've noticed that we're in 2009 (soon 2010), not in the 80's? There is no such thing as an "original PC", and thus there can be no clones.

On topic: this won't be such a big deal. It's mostly about hd manufacturers squeeezing out more megabytes per platter, thus making more money per drive. There's still the emulation mode which should be completely transparent to the machine. Can't see a "major shift" here, just a small adjustment most users won't even notice.

ADDiCT wrote:

On topic: this won't be such a big deal. It's mostly about hd manufacturers squeeezing out more megabytes per platter, thus making more money per drive. There's still the emulation mode which should be completely transparent to the machine. Can't see a "major shift" here, just a small adjustment most users won't even notice.

Well, notice they line up the physical sectors at 4K, which *most* operating systems use. That's not necessarily true of us old timers that may want to load up FAT16 and use DOS or Windows 9x. There was no mention how those operating systems would work with these new drives.

Well isn't that what the emulation mode is for? There was an article about those new hd's on the german mag c't, and they've explained the emulation mode. Sounded like it would be completely transparent to the OS. Guess there's no way to say for sure until someone gets their hands on one of those drives.

Yah, but according to anandtech, emulation mode works best with a single partition. And my point of the thread is I don't know how that WD Align utility will work with non 4K clusters. Those of us running FAT16/32 or an OS <=WinXP are not going to want 1TB+ partitions.

For business oriented computers, there is still a desire for smaller hard drives like 80, 160 or 320GB. They don't need any more. Hopefully the manufacturers keep making the <1TB drives the "old fashioned" way.

Pardon me for worrying (I'm a worry wort), but this thread about the new hard drives has me a little worried concerning the new PC I'm thinking of buying -

I'm thinking about getting a new PC from EcollegePC. http://www.ecollegepc.com/

the Value Series, sometime next month (hopefully) and I'd like to order it with XP. If this new PC comes with one of these new drives, will I still be able to run Windows 98SE via VPC/VMware Player and DOSbox with Windows 3.xx on this new hard drive with no problems of any kind as I'm able to on my current (ordered brand-new in Nov. 2001) XP PC that I wish to soon be replacing with this new PC from the EcollegePC site?

Thanks

I hope I'm worried over nothing regarding these new hard drives.

I don't think you have anything to worry about there... it comes stock with a Hitachi drive, and AFAIK, WD is the only one currently messing with large sectors.

Unrelated to the main topic, but if you're going to buy that PC, even if you don't upgrade anything else, I strongly recommend you at least spend the extra $40 to go with the Coolermaster 310 case and 460W PSU. I've dealt with both those Foxconn cases and those Foxconn PSUs, and they are some of the cheesiest crap I've ever run across.

If this new PC comes with one of these new drives, will I still be able to run Windows 98SE via VPC/VMware Player and DOSbox with Windows 3.xx on this new hard drive with no problems of any kind

This won't affect these programs. If the underlying operating system handles these drives, then any program *should* have no problem with it as well.
(I won't vouch for programs that work with the hard drive or partitions, like Partition Magic or something like that)

Dominus wrote:

If this new PC comes with one of these new drives, will I still be able to run Windows 98SE via VPC/VMware Player and DOSbox with Windows 3.xx on this new hard drive with no problems of any kind

This won't affect these programs. If the underlying operating system handles these drives, then any program *should* have no problem with it as well.
(I won't vouch for programs that work with the hard drive or partitions, like Partition Magic or something like that)

Correct, because he specifically mentioned DOSBox or VMware on top of a modern OS. Kelly, my point was using an old OS natively.