Windows 11 takes about 12 minutes to boot from an HDD. Imagine trying to boot it from an FDD.
Installing Windows 11 and then waiting for all the updates to install on a HDD takes about 8 days.
Installing Windows 11 and then waiting for all the updates to install on a HDD takes about 8 days.
I do not "use an HDD" of course. It was improvisational.
I'd consider hybrid being the best cost option, with a small SSD backing frequently used data, like the OS. But there's more complexity in that setup. I'm also a Linux user, and boot times don't bother me.
I was at Microcenter and some 1TB (rather questionable) NVMe drivers were $30 on special. Going to be difficult to get cheaper than that.
Now, lets turn your equation around. What is the cost per IOPS of your HDD versus SSD? HDDs start to get expensive very fast in that measure.
Yes, HDDs are slower than SSDs. If that axis matters to you, you'd use an SSD, particularly NVMe. (Which is sort of implied by the hybrid setup I suggest.) If storage capacity matters, HDDs. You can see this reflected in market prices, though it does look like SSDs are surprisingly cheap these days, comparatively. Historically this has not been the case. (I wonder if economies of scale are now working against HDDs suddenly, or what? There's no reason for them to cost the same or more than an SSD — the market would collapse. Although I swear market pricing for many components hasn't made a lot of sense, recently… i.e., RAM has seemed horrendously expensive.)
There does definitely seem to be a pricing mechanic in that hard drives never really scaled down in minimum unit cost; the basic parts of a hard drive still cost real money, so if you can do 2TB per platter, and a top of the line drive has 10 platters, a single platter 2TB drive costs a lot more than 10% of the top of the line drive. OTOH, flash controllers aren't that expensive and/or the cost of the controller scales with the capacity, so SSD prices tend to be more linear with capacity.
If you need a lot of space, $/B means a lot, but if you just need an ample amount of space, $/device is more important, and SSD drives have hit the point where an ample amount of space is available for less than any hard drive.
If you need very large (4TB+ drives) maybe, but 1-2TB SSDs are so cheap nowadays. 2TB SSDs today are cheaper than 2TB HHDs from 10 years ago, and the price discrepancy is quite narrow unless you're looking at 4TB+ drives.
I don't even bother looking at HHDs for my own computers anymore unless I need bulk storage for videos or something.
I think from beginning of start-up to a somewhat usable system was maybe 5 minutes? Quite long either way.
But just last weekend got sick of the slowness and found there's a 'diskutil resetFusion' [0] command that restores the partitions to the default. So I ran this command, reinstalled the OS and now my iMac is pretty speedy again. Not great mind you, but way better then before.
Lesson learned: dual boot on a Fusion drive is a bad idea.
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Mine doesn't. It takes 3-4 minutes (which can easily feel like an hour).
We need to migrate to Linux.
Marketing won't let them so long as it would piss off PC OEMs that still ship crappy systems and want to use the Windows logo.
If you got a computer and it didn't come with all the needed drivers and a web browser along with most of the functionality needed to print, you'd most likely wonder what decade it came from. All that stuff I listed, without the telemetry is still going to run like dog shit on a HDD.
I honestly think users are forgetting just how badly fragmented hard drives of days yonder used to run, and those same spinning disks are not any faster these days. Cutting down the OS to barely do anything still took more time than the complete boot cycle of my current computer up to a browser on an SSD.
I'm not going to setup a system to test, because it's too painful, but I'm now idly wondering if you could set the checkbox on a hard drive for "Turn off Windows write-cache buffer flushing on the device", and if that would help. Doing a aggregated write of a couple MB once a minute would probably work better than doing a few KB every second. Of course, at great risk of data loss, but YOLO. (a smidge of research seems to indicate this is for asking the device to pretty-please flush its internal write cache, so that might help a bit, but probably not very much; maybe there's a knob somewhere to tune the system file cache)