Microsoft Trying to Kill HDD Boot Drives by 2023

tomshardware.com

24 points·thunderbong··6 comments

I've certainly advocated that everyone should boot their OS on an SSD for years now, but I worry that once it becomes a requirement, Microsoft will stop bothering to optimize their startup process at all.

Besides, what about cheap laptops/netbooks/HTPCs that use flash memory? Do they fall under this requirement? They're not spinning disk, but they're not SSD's either.

Ye my concern too. The speedup of SSDs has allready been bloated away and you need those M2 drives to get the SSD feel nowadays.

Optimizing for HDD reads is very different from optimizing for SSDs where sequential access is irrelevant.

In my experience, Windows 10 on older entry-level HDD computers (2010s) is already terribly slow. Slow RAM isn't as bad as a slow HDD for whatever reason. Though Windows XP still feels snappy on them.

I agree; my girlfriend had a laptop for work that was a Dell Inspiron or Latitude model that was maybe five years old. It had relatively decent specs, except that it was still on a spinning-disk hard drive. She complained that Windows 10 was practically unusable for her, and I could see as much when she was WFH.

Her work agreed to get her a new laptop and gave her a $500 budget. I told her we could put a $60 SSD into it and that would probably be all it needed to feel like new. But her work's IT didn't want to touch it (or let me touch it, understandably), so she ended up getting a Lenovo laptop with an SSD.

> Microsoft will stop bothering to optimize their startup process at all.

Too late, I think. Windows is already nigh unusable on HDD. I'm pretty sure no developer at Microsoft has used an HDD in about a decade and it shows.

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