External Hard Drive
My external hard drive used on an XP machine for all backups was bought long before Vista and Windows 7 came out.
When I have to get a new computer probably running Windows 7 is there going to be problems extracting the saved data from the external hard drive to the new computer. |
I wouldn't have thought so. Connections (such as USB) are usually backwards compatible - and if you are only reading data there should be no problem.
There might be (I cannot say as I do not know) if the hard drive is formatted as FAT rather than NTFS. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File_Allocation_Table http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NTFS |
As mentioned before, there won't be any problems if the Windows Vista/7 machine's storage format matches the format of the files on the external drive! I have a tonne of files from my old Toshiba laptop which operated XP which load on my Windows 7 laptop! Also, all Vista software/drivers/hardware are backwards compatible with Windows 7 - how do I know this??? My modem drivers are compatible with Vista and I needed the Internet in a rush...... I chucked the CD in and installed the files and it worked!
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I think FAT 32 file system was left behind with Windows 98 . XP and later OS all default to NTFS i believe.
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You can still use FAT 32 file system on XP but the speed of copying and saving something on hard drive is very slow.
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Geeky bits
All FAT FAT32 and NTFS (there are several ver) are microsoft file systems... the main difference being :- Max file size and max partion size (many other differences eg encryption capabilities ease of data recovery after disaster etc)
The speed is dependent on the buss (USB in this case) As you probably already know usb fat32 devices are plug and play on windows 7 (yes it will work/be compatible) The last windows os to use fat32 was win98se (can install xp on fat32 - not the default option) If the usb device (hard disk) is not faulty, win 7 will pick it up (no drivers needed) and you will have read & write cababilities |
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