Microsoft calls on OEMs to kill off HDD boot drives by next year
- Thread starter midian182
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captaincranky
Posts: 19,688 +8,829
Sorry to say, (er, I mean "report"), that ship has already sailed. And sorry to mention it but, I'd be willing to bet, the OEMs are loving it.
Given Windows 11's "incompatibility", with a host of older hardware, OEMs can't help but rejoice at the prospect of selling all new PCs, to people who (inexplicably), feel the need to have, "the latest and greatest"
version of Windows .Which also "inexplicably", was never supposed to exist in the first place. Satya Nadella said so himself, so you know it must be "true".
So, point blank. The OEMs aren't at odds with this at all. They're more than ikely celebrating their "conspiracy", with M$. (Sorry, I meant "partnership" with M$).
DAOWAce
Posts: 325 +64
My father bought a new laptop recently.. he hated using it because it was so slow (and Win10). I never bothered to look at it because I chastised him for not buying what I recommended (Ryzen system with an APU and SSD), but eventually did as I wanted to upgrade his old laptop to an SSD since he kept using it instead. It was utterly horrific, took 2 minutes to even be responsive after a reboot, and even task manager took multiple seconds to load.
Turns out the slowness with the new laptop was entirely the HDD. Once I cloned it to an SSD, the system was so damn responsive it was like a completely different class of computer.
I cannot believe PCs are still shipping with HDD's. It's like the Vista days of 512MB RAM all over again.
Turns out the slowness with the new laptop was entirely the HDD. Once I cloned it to an SSD, the system was so damn responsive it was like a completely different class of computer.
I cannot believe PCs are still shipping with HDD's. It's like the Vista days of 512MB RAM all over again.
Mr Majestyk
Posts: 2,058 +1,903
I don't live in a country where electricity is free or even cheap, so I always shut my computer down every time I finish using it and fast boot times are a must. My old HDD based PC running Windows 10 took up to 2 minutes to boot and then a further minute or two to load all the crap.
Complaining about SSD for boot drive as a minimum spec is ludicrous. WTF are you doing using a HDD for such a thing. Swapping my old laptops HDD for an SSD was better than about 8 generations of pathetic Intel CPU updates as far responsiveness of the OS was concerned. The only thing that sucks is that 4TB+ SSD's are still stupidly expensive and QLC is a joke.
Complaining about SSD for boot drive as a minimum spec is ludicrous. WTF are you doing using a HDD for such a thing. Swapping my old laptops HDD for an SSD was better than about 8 generations of pathetic Intel CPU updates as far responsiveness of the OS was concerned. The only thing that sucks is that 4TB+ SSD's are still stupidly expensive and QLC is a joke.
Vanderlinde
Posts: 436 +273
They already done that. I mean nummerous times actually. The release of Windows XP. You needed newer and faster hardware. The release of Windows 7. You needed newer and faster hardware. The release of Windows 10, well say goodbye to your old hardware at that point. I mean various hardware failed to operate on newer OS'es due to the lack of proper drivers. Microsoft made it just too complex for for example older printers, scanners and such to even work properly.
Their influence in sales of hardware is gigantic. Lots of machines are sold to this day with oversized specs that most of 'm woud'nt even use. Now I can relate to swapping out a platter based storage which is just awefully slow with a SSD. There's still quircks to using a mechanical HDD compared to a SSD.
One of the most important in my book is this:
- That mechanical drive can quit one day out of nowhere. Dataloss.
- That mechanical drive stills needs maintaince such as defragmentation.
- That same mechanical drive is just becoming slow to todays standards.
Even an intel 80GB SSD is faster then a mechical HDD. It wins already on acces time(s. And the quality of storage, like it's life expectency is quite better then a HDD.
Ive had too many HDD's fail from nummerous brands such as Seagate, WD, hitachi or whatever, just out of nowhere broken. Ive ran a HDD datarecovery thing for 2.5 years and above where the most brands with highest faillure rate.
Take into account that HDD's became more and more complex, you coud'nt just swap out the PCB anymore in the case of a PCB faillure. Nope. The ECU, MCU, firmware all that had to be transplanted to a donor PCB in order to fix it.
It's good for long term storage, but to be honest I have all my HDD"s disconnected since they spin for no reason really other then storing my data. When I need it ill hook 'm up. The best HDD's that still work here to this date where samsung's of each 320GB a piece. Now thats build quality.
I was in a PC store last week. They had a shelf with relic hardware. A 2.5inch WD Raptor of over 10k rpm and it's own heatsink. It was considered the fastest consumer HDD you could find that spun at 10k rpm. Today's standards even a cheap SSD blows that right out of the waters.
Dimitriid
Posts: 2,451 +4,924
That's a lot of words to say "I either don't know or willfully ignore the fact that SSDs can and routinely do fail, with even less warning signs that mechanical drives in fact"
Other than that I would only say that there's a big difference between insufficient ram or processor cycles and a slow hard drive because well boot times might be important but they're not a constant issue that never goes away like running out of ram and going into page file.
Windows Vista being an incredible resource hog for the time it came out could potentially be attribute to just very poor coding. Let's even ignore the hdd is 100% necessary argument: Barring CPUs that can comply with TPM 2.0 with a motherboard header and module, what's your defense for that? Can't be about security since if TPM 2.0 is absolutely necessary, Ryzen 1000 CPUs can absolutely get TPM 2.0 installed almost all AM4 motherboards have the TPM header so what's the problem there?
fadingfool
Posts: 332 +416
A "soft" (I.e. fast startup) reboot into win10 from my HDD equipped laptop (2012 spec - yes it is 10 years old) is about 30 seconds. Admittedly it has a 32GB sata SSD as a cache drive (Intel rapid storage - puts the two drives in a RAID 0 array to act as one drive with a 32GB cache) - but it is still very usable. I think this is another attempt to make older hardware deprecated, this time so MS can abandon "fast startup" from future versions of windows (until it gets so bloated again that even PCIe 5.0 NVMEs can't keep up).
captaincranky
Posts: 19,688 +8,829
So do you think OEMs should equip all laptops with dual HDDs in a RAID 0 setup? Or maybe do something actually sensible and shove a SATA 3 SSD in them. I mean it's cute what you have going, however impractical, unorthodox, or overly complex it may be. That said, a single SATA 3 SSD will still kick its a**(On the cheap, no less)
fadingfool
Posts: 332 +416
Erm that isn't what I wrote - and the laptop did come with an HDD and small M.2 SATA SSD (think wifi-card 2242 size) to act as a cache drive (Intel rapid storage was often installed to do this). MS are pushing to kill off the option to boot from HDD and I doubt it is to force OEMS to equip laptops with SSDs - as I said above it is probably so they can kill off fast startup (and all its associated problems).
captaincranky
Posts: 19,688 +8,829
Well, if I understood the article correctly, M$ us asking that ALL machines be equipped with with SSDs, not simply laptops.
In today's world, boot times with HDDs are absurd. So why not kill off a feature that is only there to humor the few holdouts clinging to HDDs anyway?
Even the lowliest of modern boards have an NVme port designated specifically as "C:/". So, SATA 3 really isn't much of an ask..
And yes, the overly stringent industrial strength security measures in Windows 11 are intended to render older platforms obsolete..
yesnt
Posts: 19 +11
It's not RAID0. It's not RAID anything. RAID is different from caching.
wiyosaya
Posts: 9,769 +9,660
As a professional developer, I hard shutdown every night and have set the bios to turn on my PC every morning at 6:00 AM so it is ready for me to work when I get in. So why do I do this?? What many might not know is that Windows, whatever version, has been plagued by memory leaks since pre-XP days and likely even longer. The way that I work, these memory leaks will often show up in various ways. Some people might not notice this, but the memory leaks are still there and can show up in various and odd, perhaps totally unexpected, ways.
Some of my colleagues never shut down, and when they tell me that they are seeing weird things in Windows, I tell them "Reboot". Then they do and the problems disappear.
fadingfool
Posts: 332 +416
I beg to differ "Intel Rapid Storage Technology, until 2010 called Matrix RAID, is a firmware-based RAID solution built into a wide range of Intel chipsets. As of 2020, it includes a RAID system capable of RAID levels 0, 1, 5, and 10, a block level SSD caching accelerator with support for write-back and write-through modes for speed or data protection of any disk or RAID array".
Windows 10 boots in mere second from the press of the power button.
Where as Nearly any XP machine is going to go through a lengthy posting process.
You listed two Server chips, with I'm assuming two server boards. Can't really compare XP to 10 when the Posting of the machine between the two are not really the same. I've found 10 to boot just as fast as XP did even on a SSD. My Dell Server's Post time is crazy compared to ESXI booting.
captaincranky
Posts: 19,688 +8,829
This may be true but, the issue was more pronounced in XP, as opposed to Windows 7, which can tolerate days more up time, than XP ever could.
In my usage, (primarily internet), the browser is more likely to lock up than the OS. And contrary to some belief systems Firefox is a memory hog, as compared to Chrome based browsers. especially in the later multi process later versions.
As to whether any of that is attributable to the OS, you would be a better judge of that than me.
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captaincranky
Posts: 19,688 +8,829
To be sure, XP was never offered on machines with a SATA 3 interface, with some being as "primitive" as SATA 1. Vista was the first version of Windows offered with native SATA drivers.
So frankly it's naive, bordering on silly, to compare boot times with XP and HDD versus a modern machine. SATA 3 has 4 times the throughput as SATA 1, and modern SATA 3 SSDs can virtually saturate the SATA 3 buss, whereas any HDD will max out at 1/3 of the available speed.
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captaincranky
Posts: 19,688 +8,829
I beg to differ as well. Some Intel chipsets do indeed offer RAID options. In fact, a board as old as my P-45 has them available.
What you also do not seem to know, is with XP it was necessary to install an Intel "pre-driver", via the floppy drive, to enable the "AHCI" mode. Otherwise, the drives ran in "IDE" mode.(Integrated Drive Electronics).
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captaincranky
Posts: 19,688 +8,829
I managed to trash my very last XP installation. It was 32 bit and I had a copy of 64 bit 7 Pro laying around, with 8 GB of matched RAM. Si, I said to myself, "screw it, it's time to make the swap. I pulled the C;/ drive and stuffed in another machine. No joy. So I did a live run of Ubuntu, and trashed the Windows folder.
When I tried to copy the rest of the files from the drive, I got no progress bats (or circles) from Linux whatsoever. I don't know if this would have been the case on an installed version of Ubuntu, but after the Windows folder.was in the trash, I resortef to Windows to copy the rest of the data files. Win 7 was kind enough to show me what the heck was going on with respect to the status of the transfers. So, Windows can't be all bad, can it?
ilovetohateyou
Posts: 27 +22
Lots of extremely bad takes here.
The average user does not need an HDD because the average user does not use a lot of storage. The difference in cost to vendors to put in 512GB of SSD storage versus 1 or 2TB of HDD storage is negligible while the difference in experience even for a casual user doing mostly light tasks is notable.
Vendors are saving a sliver of money that probably isn't worth it in the long run since time and again novice users end up complaining about their $300 Windows machine and comparing it negatively to Apple products, even though they didn't spend the requisite amount to have the comparison be valid.
In 2022 the short-term savings in putting an HDD vs. an SSD cannot possibly be worth the marginal but measurable negative esteem many customers will have for the brand.
But hey, I'm not in the board room with Jimmy Dell or Johnny HP, so maybe the profit is worth it. I just know that when someone asks me my opinion on computer purchases things like 8GB of (upgradeable) RAM and an HDD (of any capacity) rather than an SSD are reasons to look for another product, excepting if the deal on the product with the slow storage and inadequate memory is good enough that aftermarket purchases don't eat into the savings. Otherwise I'd tell someone to spend $75 more for a machine that already has a half TB of SSD storage and 16GB of RAM. And I also know a lot of other "computer guys" out there do the same.
Of course it's quite possible that vendors actually want customers to see the weak specs of the cheapest products and go up to the better model and that such a consideration is a more important factor than the actual difference in cost between SSDs and HDDs.
tl;dr I don't think the savings of an HDD vs. an SSD justify the increased likelihood that the customer's "computer guy" friend will price the necessary upgrades into the cost and likely tell them to get another product.
The average user does not need an HDD because the average user does not use a lot of storage. The difference in cost to vendors to put in 512GB of SSD storage versus 1 or 2TB of HDD storage is negligible while the difference in experience even for a casual user doing mostly light tasks is notable.
Vendors are saving a sliver of money that probably isn't worth it in the long run since time and again novice users end up complaining about their $300 Windows machine and comparing it negatively to Apple products, even though they didn't spend the requisite amount to have the comparison be valid.
In 2022 the short-term savings in putting an HDD vs. an SSD cannot possibly be worth the marginal but measurable negative esteem many customers will have for the brand.
But hey, I'm not in the board room with Jimmy Dell or Johnny HP, so maybe the profit is worth it. I just know that when someone asks me my opinion on computer purchases things like 8GB of (upgradeable) RAM and an HDD (of any capacity) rather than an SSD are reasons to look for another product, excepting if the deal on the product with the slow storage and inadequate memory is good enough that aftermarket purchases don't eat into the savings. Otherwise I'd tell someone to spend $75 more for a machine that already has a half TB of SSD storage and 16GB of RAM. And I also know a lot of other "computer guys" out there do the same.
Of course it's quite possible that vendors actually want customers to see the weak specs of the cheapest products and go up to the better model and that such a consideration is a more important factor than the actual difference in cost between SSDs and HDDs.
tl;dr I don't think the savings of an HDD vs. an SSD justify the increased likelihood that the customer's "computer guy" friend will price the necessary upgrades into the cost and likely tell them to get another product.
captaincranky
Posts: 19,688 +8,829
"Step up selling" has been a staple of most, if not all consumer goods for decades. In fact , (with perhaps a few exceptions), the only reason for very bottom of the line products to exist, is for the sales staff to sell away from them. Hi-fi vendors were particularly notorious for advertising "loss leader" items. The cheapest piece in a product line was advertised at, or even below cost. Of course it was "out of stock" by the time you got there. They did however , have the one which was, "much better", and "only a hundred dollars more", available
In many instances involving food stuffs, the only reason customers pay higher prices for the same quality of product as a store brand is "brand recognition".
While this is not universally true, it is in many cases.
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Vanderlinde
Posts: 436 +273
Traditional HDD's can just stop working without any notice as well. Ive done HDD recovery for 2.5 years and I got quite some drives that just stopped working due to primarily PCB faillure.
HDD's got more complex as well, you dont just swap out a PCB these anymore either. They have a custom firmware and often a custom MCU that you have to swap over to a donor board before it could even work.
Point being is; there's just alot of (good) resources wasted on fairly modern computers while software is just hogging the living hell out of it. I by default turn windows updates, off. Ive had 2 times dataloss, and 2 times a non functional system or lost my work because I left the machine on with tabs open with stuff did'nt save.
Microsoft lost it's way into providing a OS that serves us, not the other way around.
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