Why new hard disks might not be much fun for XP users

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....<p>- average user -

I think by now XP users are used to not having much fun. Your operating system is <i>ten years old!</i> The average hard drive was 40GB when it was released!

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

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...<p>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.

Quote about current situation:<p><i>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);</i><p>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.<p>The article does not specify if the 10^14 number is going up in the new hardware. If not ...

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.