zyzzle wrote on 2022-06-11, 02:00:

cyclone3d wrote on 2022-06-10, 16:53:

If programs were "optimized" to reduce random reads they would need to have everything in one huge file. Every update would have to modify this huge file and then the OS would need to defragment said file and make sure that the file was not fragmented at all.

This scenario is just no feasible and would be a huge waste of time for all involved. It would also wear out the HDDs abnormally quickly.

My understanding of what a .WIM file is that it *is* just one huge file. Windows should be able to load this single, compressed file quickly on modern systems, even (gasp!) on a mechanical HD. However, the problem is all the small, fragmented crap that gets installed by other companies' unoptimizaed applications which store 1000s of tiny, wasteful files on SSDs, *and* hard drives, instead of having a .WIM like single-file. This file could be "decompressed" to memory and / or a ramdrive, where the hundreds of small individual files could be placed / kept instead. That's a form of optimization which if implemented properly, would still make mechanical drives actually usable on modern Windows. The problem is the registry, and the piecemeal placement of thousands of files. Windows itself does this. Have you seen that there are now close to *100,000* files in a default Windows installation on the drive now?!! That's absurd.... and why Windows is no longer usable on a mechanical hard dirve. Create a Ramdrive, optimize programs and windows to use it, instead.

Yeah... And I already mentioned something like that. What happens when there is an update?

zyzzle wrote on 2022-06-11, 01:50:

It's an incredible act of effrontery and arrogance for MS to no longer suppord mechanical hard-drives.

This is not happening. Stop peddling fake news.

dr_st wrote on 2022-06-11, 07:18:

zyzzle wrote on 2022-06-11, 01:50:

It's an incredible act of effrontery and arrogance for MS to no longer suppord mechanical hard-drives.

This is not happening. Stop peddling fake news.

Certainly a weird bit of fake news too .. only way to stop supporting HDDs would be to stop supporting SATA ...which will never happen, much like Floppy drives are still supported even under windows 11 even if its via USB. (I do wonder if windows 11 would be compatible with a normal floppy say if it was installed on a 775 board with a physical floppy connector, I have no reason to believe it wouldn't be but my brain does ask such questions of me.)

Why are we talking about ssds like they are a novelty like they were in 2008?

Back in 2016 or so, when I first switched over from a mechanical hard drive to an SSD, I felt like it was the single, most meaningful upgrade I ever made. The responsiveness of the system increased tremendously, and loading times in games were noticeably shortened. Even mundane tasks like web browsing and office work felt snappier.

Not sure who even installs a modern OS on a mechanical hard drive nowadays. They are perfectly fine for file storage though.

I think this is overall good. I mean I still remember Vista laptops shipped with too little RAM to be usable and Windows 10 laptops shipped with 32GB SSDs. OEMs don't make good choices and I like Microsoft trying to push them to. Yeah laptops will be more expensive, but to anyone whose time is worth anything it will eventually pay itself.

zyzzle wrote on 2022-06-11, 02:07:

davidrg wrote on 2022-06-10, 22:23:

Given windows will still support booting for SATA SSDs I'd be a little surprised if they actually wrote code to try and detect the type of hard disk and output an error message if it wasn't an SSD.

The problem is an ideological one; the OS shouldn't care which type of storage is being used. A user should be able to install Windows onto which ever media he chooses. It shouldn't be dictated to him, nor forced. Data is data, the OS shouldn't care if it is run from floppy disks, USB memory sticks, SSDs, ATA hard drives, or optical drives! It should be robust enough to boot from all of these options. MS is being lazy and inefficieient by just eliminating things which might cause it extra work.

They have a limited amount of developers, focusing them on more important things than supporting features practically no one uses isn't inefficiency or laziness.

zyzzle wrote on 2022-06-11, 01:50:

When one can purchase a 16-TB NvMe drive for $200, get back to me. Until then, stuff it MS. We're not all rich bastards like you.

Read the article. Microsoft is fine with you having a SSD boot drive + HDD storage. They're also not going to prevent you from building your own computer without a SSD, though common sense should.

swaaye wrote on 2022-06-10, 03:15:

SSDs must be available to OEMs for extremely cheap these days. The one issue I see is that the ubiquitous 1TB HDD is probably going to be hard to replace in those budget machines with 1TB SSDs and I am sure a lot of people judge a PC by storage capacity.

I'm not so sure calling 1TB HDDs ubiquitous is right. I mean that means found everywhere, and I think that's only thing in developing markets, as hinted to in the article. I'm not even sure I could find a PC without a SSD to buy here if I looked thoroughly.

bakemono wrote on 2022-06-10, 21:54:

I've never used an SSD or felt the need to get one, but it does look like the prices have come down to where the modestly sized ones are attractive compared to HDDs. Do they still have compatibility problems with sector/block alignment that need special OS support?

I've been using SSDs for as long as I remember and this was never a thing. You might have been reading some weird optimization guide, or tech site, with little focus on real world application.

SSDs will behave fine as regular SATA drives, and except being faster, will to everything old be indistinguishable from a regular HDD. Hell I still use SSDs in my original PlayStation 2, Wii and Xbox. None of those have special OS support. My Win98/WinXP dual boot PC runs on a SSD, no problems.

davidrg wrote on 2022-06-11, 02:36:

Windows will still support mechanical drives. You'll almost certainly still be able to install windows on mechanical drives if you want awful performance for some reason. OEMs just won't be allowed to sell such garbage to customers who don't know better. If the consumer wants to replace the SSD with spinning rust Microsoft almost certainly isn't going to put effort into stopping them.

Thanks for clarifying. Certainly, if this only applies to OEM sellers / vendors, and not all users who install it, this might be seen as a good option. I had thought, erroneously, that *all* users wouldn't be able to install to mechanical drives. So, it will cut down on the cheap, slow as crap entry-level laptop market, and hopefully raise the bar of their performance. That's a great thing.

Hell, I wouldn't want to use a mechanical drive, but in a pinch or an emergency, it would be a pity to be locked out of installing the OS onto one. I'm sincerely glad the option isn't being taken away.

zyzzle wrote on 2022-06-11, 13:04:

davidrg wrote on 2022-06-11, 02:36:

Windows will still support mechanical drives. You'll almost certainly still be able to install windows on mechanical drives if you want awful performance for some reason. OEMs just won't be allowed to sell such garbage to customers who don't know better. If the consumer wants to replace the SSD with spinning rust Microsoft almost certainly isn't going to put effort into stopping them.

Thanks for clarifying. Certainly, if this only applies to OEM sellers / vendors, and not all users who install it, this might be seen as a good option. I had thought, erroneously, that *all* users wouldn't be able to install to mechanical drives. So, it will cut down on the cheap, slow as crap entry-level laptop market, and hopefully raise the bar of their performance. That's a great thing.

Hell, I wouldn't want to use a mechanical drive, but in a pinch or an emergency, it would be a pity to be locked out of installing the OS onto one. I'm sincerely glad the option isn't being taken away.

Yeah, having had a quick look at the entry level laptop options around here I don't think any of them are actually worth the asking price, even if that price is very low. A second-hand ex-lease business machine can be had for similar money and, while somewhat older, will probably provide better performance and build quality so remain useful for somewhat longer. Compared to that the new machines just aren't worth it - they're a step above e-waste. And not the good kind that will be worth something as a vintage computer some day. Better Microsoft forces the minimum spec up to something reasonable that will last a few years.

The more concerning matter is whether or not Microsoft will require the Pluton security processor for Windows 12. AMD is incorporating it in their future hardware, in collaboration with Microsoft, but Intel isn't committing to it yet and Dell has publicly gone against it, saying they won't ship products with it, as they already have their own line of security software/services tied to Intel's hardware.

RetroGamer4Ever wrote on 2022-06-11, 23:06:

The more concerning matter is whether or not Microsoft will require the Pluton security processor for Windows 12. AMD is incorporating it in their future hardware, in collaboration with Microsoft, but Intel isn't committing to it yet and Dell has publicly gone against it, saying they won't ship products with it, as they already have their own line of security software/services tied to Intel's hardware.

Pretty sure the new OS shouldn't be coming before 5 years. By then, people should be knowledged enough about it. Unlike Win11's requirements that came out only that year of release.

maxtherabbit wrote on 2022-06-09, 19:15:

The current builds of win10 have been unusable on a HDD for several years now. That optimization is long gone

100%

Intel486dx33 wrote on 2022-06-10, 15:25:

Apple has discontinued raid on its computers to just using JBOD ( Just a bunch of Disks ) I don’t know if Microsoft is supportin […]
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Apple has discontinued raid on its computers to just using JBOD ( Just a bunch of Disks )
I don’t know if Microsoft is supporting this yet.

But if so you can repurpose all those old drives in a JBOD grouping.
Or build a NAS or Media Plex server from an old computer.

Building an old Media Plex server is fun and great project for the home.

JBOD is a terrible idea for most conventional RAID applications though, you will get capacity sure, maybe even a performance boost but you lose all fault tolerance.
Plus you up your chances of data lost to however many times drives your RAID is.

as a OEM requirement I think it's completely fair to have some minimum standards for an appropriate user experience;
for DIY I don't think they will actively block installing in a hard drive...
and yes win10 is pretty slow in HDs, it can be used with some patience but the user experience is pretty poor even if the rest of the PC is good;

as for efficiency well, there are far more layers of security and things running on top for compatibility with things that didn't exist 20 years ago, it's not really a fair comparison, but even Vista was considered "too heavy" and that was 2006.

Well, I guess you can still roll Windows 11 with 15k SAS 2.5 inch HDD, maybe even with second or third gen Velociraptor. Won't be quiet much though.

Does Windows 11 support MFM drives?

Conventional mechanical Hard drives performed fine up until WIndows-7 from my recollection.
Win-10 made Hard drives run slow because of the all the bloatware ( Onedrive, Google Drive, iTunes, constant updates, backups, etc. )

Intel486dx33 wrote on 2022-06-13, 18:10:

Win-10 made Hard drives run slow because of the all the bloatware ( Onedrive, Google Drive, iTunes, constant updates, backups, etc. )

Considering that every one of these can be turned off / removed (updates can be disabled in Pro, and postponed and managed on Home), there must be another reason.

dr_st wrote:

there must be another reason.

Random access didn't improve much after 7200k / 3.5 inch became standard in early 2000s.

dr_st wrote on 2022-06-13, 20:28:

Intel486dx33 wrote on 2022-06-13, 18:10:

Win-10 made Hard drives run slow because of the all the bloatware ( Onedrive, Google Drive, iTunes, constant updates, backups, etc. )

Considering that every one of these can be turned off / removed (updates can be disabled in Pro, and postponed and managed on Home), there must be another reason.

Vista and 7 are slow on HDDs as well. SO is XP

For that matter, use an SSD on a 486 machine running DOS and you can easily tell the speed difference between a 7200rpm drive and an SSD.

cyclone3d wrote on 2022-06-13, 21:03:

dr_st wrote on 2022-06-13, 20:28:

Intel486dx33 wrote on 2022-06-13, 18:10:

Win-10 made Hard drives run slow because of the all the bloatware ( Onedrive, Google Drive, iTunes, constant updates, backups, etc. )

Considering that every one of these can be turned off / removed (updates can be disabled in Pro, and postponed and managed on Home), there must be another reason.

Vista and 7 are slow on HDDs as well. SO is XP

For that matter, use an SSD on a 486 machine running DOS and you can easily tell the speed difference between a 7200rpm drive and an SSD.

I would only use a SSD with modern computers as TRIM (which improves the life span) is only supported since Windows 7 without having to rely on a third-party utility.

As for the "bloatware" thing, why people don't complain when mobile devices and macOS do exactly the same thing?