Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by moffkalast 1469 days ago
That's interesting, I cloned a Win10 installation on a HDD to a sata SSD a year or two back and the speed difference was considerable. Especially something like Atom that took minutes to open before was ready to go in like 10 seconds afterwards.

A lot of things remained slow though.

4 comments

Somewhere around IIRC Win8 Microsoft must have gotten really lax about minimizing disk access. Windows started being slow as molasses on an HDD, even for stuff like opening the start menu.

This hurts performance a ton on SSDs, too, it's just less noticeable. Something that should happen so fast you can hardly measure how long it takes, takes... just long enough to notice, which may amount to 100x as long as it should take, but 100x a small number is still pretty small.

Yeah the change from a 7200 HDD to an SSD for those 10 year old machines provides a very considerable improvement. It goes from "unusable" to "moderate" performance for general web browsing and business duties.

I'm talking about Windows 10 on 4G C2Q or Phenom/Phenom II machines - they aren't fast but they're very usable with a SSD and GPU in place.

The bigger question is why does a glorified text editor take 10 seconds to open on any system?

Is it loading 2000 plugins?

Electron, that's why.
You're comparing 10 to 10, so of course an SSD will only help in that situation.

But if any parts of 10 are sufficiently badly coded compared to 7, that will overcome the drive. And some parts definitely are, especially in the start menu code.