Throughout all the years of hard drive manufacturing, almost all hard drives have only been required to have a minimum of 512 byte sectors. As technology progresses however, some parts need to catch up, and hard drive makers will have to do that catch up by next year. The IDEMA is requiring every single manufacturer to now require a removal of the old 512 byte sectors, and the addition instead of 4KB sectors. While this sounds like a good idea, it may be problematic to Windows XP users. Windows 7, along with Windows Vista, both support this new technology upgrade, but sadly, Windows XP only supports the old and outdated size sectors. Depending on adoption rates to the new Windows operating systems, many users may see slower performance once these new drives hit. Luckily, they will still be able to be used on a Windows XP computer, for everyone who plans to make a hard drive upgrade. Though experts that are researching the situation are estimating that a ten percent performance loss will take place, due to some cases in which certain functions took a single operation, will now take two operations due to the emulation needed. Windows 7 users should see better power-consumption, as well as the overall speed and reliability of the entire operating system due to less wasted space and increase error detection from the larger block sector size.