If you’re still running Windows XP and need to purchase a new hard disk, you might find performance actually decrease. The reason is drive manufacturers are changing from 512-byte sectors to 4096-byte sectors. While this doesn’t sound like much, the 512-byte standard is 30 years old and it’s baked into lots of hardware and software. Software like Windows XP for instance. XP’s method of disk handling will double the number of operations for most (but not all) disk accesses effectively cutting the speed of the disk in half. Some drive manufacturers are coming out with partial workarounds for this but the handwriting is on the wall.
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