[badsectoracula]

In my experience what the switch to SSDs resulted into was Windows 10 becoming practically unusable on a mechanical HDD. Comparing how long the OS needs to start up, launch applications, etc on my laptop with Win10 vs a much older laptop with Win8 (the first and last time Microsoft bothered to optimize Windows the last decade) is night and day and that older laptop originally came with Vista!

When i first installed Win8 on that laptop i was so impressed i even took a video[0] of it (and yes, it seems like they kept that performance in 8, though sadly by 8.1 it became slower).

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ti3LQHXZ0Qg

[rbanffy]

The same happens on Macs. Starting Safari on an HD-based Mac is painfully slow.

[cable2600]

At Microcenter you can buy a house brand SSD hard drive with 128G on it for $58 and boot from that and store all your other files on a D:\ regular hard drive. That is how I set up my son's Windows 10 gaming rig.

[badsectoracula]

Yeah, my main PC is all SSDs. I might replace my laptop's mechanical disk with an SSD but i use it very rarely. If anything i use my retro(ish) PC more often than my laptop so i'm thinking i might buy a cheap SSD for that instead :-P.

[zokula]

Just know you can run a full Linux desktop experience on top of twenty-year-old spinning rust just fine. Micro$oft drooped the ball big time if one needs a ssd just to use a OS.

[rocqua]

they optimized for current hardware, sacrificing some performance on outdated hardware.

I'd rather windows uses my SSD to the fullest, than that it makes concessions to spinning disks.

[badsectoracula]

How is Windows using SSD to its fullest? All it seems to be doing is taking advantage of the greater speed to perform more I/O that it didn't do before which negates any performance improvements the SSD brings.

[treve]

I'm not sure this is the right take, as I don't believe it's a matter of choosing to optimize for SSD vs. HDD's. Disks got faster, so the bar for baseline acceptable performance got higher.

[cable2600]

It needs a SSD drive to boot faster. Otherwise it takes a few minutes instead of seconds.

Windows 10 is for newer hardware anyway, it runs slow on older hardware.

[soulofmischief]

You are completely missing their point. "For newer hardware" means slower. I remember how Windows 7 was so well-designed that it actually ran faster on my all of my old XP machines than XP did. It was a step up in performance, not a step down.

In 2018 Microsoft disbanded the Windows team and moved engineering efforts to its cloud and AI teams. Windows 10 is on life support by engineers who aren't intimately familiar with its codebase. Performance and usability will only degrade in this situation and the specifications of newer hardware don't excuse constant deterioration in performance.

[evilos]

It was a re-org, those engineering teams just moved to be under CAI or ED. The people are still there.

[soulofmischief]

The people are still there, but there's no organizational impetus to always use them, plus they have other duties now. The team being disbanded means a loss in product tightness and quality control.

[mavhc]

All non Azure MS products are legacy now.

Windows 10 is probably slow on HDDs because it's updating a load of UWP apps in the background, resmon.exe disk tab will show what's going on.

[wolfi1]

Ironically, Mark Russinovich, the author of Regmon, is now responsible for Azure

[chrisandchris]

There are countries where you will live with that $58 dollar for 2 weeks (or more). Maybe not everyone has the money to buy a SSD.