I haven't used a HDD as a boot device for about 12 years now.

Even all of my retro machines that can possibly run solid state for the boot device are built that way.

One of the first things I changed at my last job was not deploying any machines that had a HDD as a boot device.

Was around the same time that I asked why we weren't on 64-bit Windows yet and my manager at the time said it would be too difficult to change over to 64-bit. I proved that wrong in about 15 minutes. Only real change that had to be done was to install 64-bit print drivers on the print server.

Got my site fully converted and it was very shortly after that that the other 2 sites I helped with were all 64-bit as well.

incompetence in programming and optimisation leads to hardware upgrade but little improvement if terms of speed due to bad code

imagine instead of R&D in new ssd or ram investing into OS optimisation...

Jo22 wrote on 2022-06-09, 19:02:

It seems that Microsoft plans to discourage the use of HDDs for the Windows installation.

Everyone has been discouraging the use of HDDs for boot drives, for years now. Microsoft seems to be the last to jump on that bandwagon. 😀

Jo22 wrote on 2022-06-09, 19:02:

Personally, I believe that's just a lazy workaround to make Windows 11 appear to run more snappy.

Boot performance has been generally improving with every Windows generation.

BEEN_Nath_58 wrote on 2022-06-09, 19:45:

People should be happy with a warning instead of removing the option to install in the HDD

I don't think the option will ever be removed. Not in the foreseeable future. Microsoft is notoriously slow in actually EOLing capabilities.

DosFreak wrote on 2022-06-09, 20:15:

May as well just merge an ssd the size of the os with the cpu with just enough space to last 3yrs so you have to buy a new machine.....

This reminds me of a post I'd been wanting to make for some time now. Maybe I'll finally get around to it. 😁

I would say they've been passively discouraging it during Windows 7 era, which required at least ADFD Raptor to work snappy enough.

dr_st wrote on 2022-06-10, 06:20:

Jo22 wrote on 2022-06-09, 19:02:

It seems that Microsoft plans to discourage the use of HDDs for the Windows installation.

Everyone has been discouraging the use of HDDs for boot drives, for years now. Microsoft seems to be the last to jump on that bandwagon. 😀

But making SSDs a requirement isn't cool, IMHO.
That's so single sided. Doing so will lock out physical RAM disks (essentially HDD emulators) that look like HDDs or certain VMs/emulators.
Some hybrid HDDs work quite nicely for booting, also.
Not just the Momentus XT type of HDDs with some pseudo AI,
but also certain SSHDs with its flash memory under OS control.
Windows Vista had introduced an API for that, if I remember correctly.

What "worries" me a bit is that MS has changed over the years.
Instead of fixing things, it drops support.
It's not too far fetched that the company will remove complete IDE/SATA support soon afterwards.
According to the current hype, SATA SSDs are deprecated, after all.
And the NVME SSDs normally use a complete different set of drivers, anyway.
And optical drives are seen as a niche, MS has stopped selling Windows on DVD altogether years ago.
Even though Blu-ray is still doing well, ironically.
Also USB HDD/SSD support technically is entirely separate from internal HDD support,
so external storage wouldn't be affected.

dr_st wrote on 2022-06-10, 06:20:

Jo22 wrote on 2022-06-09, 19:02:

Personally, I believe that's just a lazy workaround to make Windows 11 appear to run more snappy.

Boot performance has been generally improving with every Windows generation.

But, but.. Windows 98SE does boot quicker than Windows 11! 😕

Jo22 wrote on 2022-06-10, 13:47:

What "worries" me a bit is that MS has changed over the years.
Instead of fixing things, it drops support.

I don't see it happening.

Jo22 wrote on 2022-06-10, 13:47:

But, but.. Windows 98SE does boot quicker than Windows 11! 😕

On hardware where Windows 11 is relevant, Windows 98 may not boot at all.
And vice-versa.

Win98SE does far fewer things and supports far less different hardware compared to Win11, or even Win10/8.1/7.

I'm talking about incremental changes between consecutive versions of the same core OS (NT, in this case).

Jo22 wrote:

It's not too far fetched that the company will remove complete IDE/SATA support soon afterwards.

It's too far fetched. AHCI won't be dropped anytime soon. PATA? Yeah, right after Microsoft removal of floppy support "anytime now". Or SCSI, or...

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.

ala_borbe wrote on 2022-06-10, 06:16:

incompetence in programming and optimisation leads to hardware upgrade but little improvement if terms of speed due to bad code

imagine instead of R&D in new ssd or ram investing into OS optimisation...

That's not how it works at all.

With HDDs you have physical heads that have to move back and forth. The seek time is the biggest drawback to HDDs, the transfer rate is secondary for the most part unless you are using a program that uses huge files.

The OS writes the files where they can fit.

If you wanted reduced seek time as an "optimization", then the OS would have to be monitoring every program and have a database of what programs used what files and then be in a "defragmentation" state whenever the system is idle.

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.

Native Command Queuing (NCQ) was introduced years ago to solve some of the issues with head movement.
It reduced both head movement (wear) and increased performance at same time.
Akin to a lift that halts on each floor to take all the passengers,
instead of erratically moving up and down each time a passenger presses the button at a different floor level.

Perhaps there are other tricks like putting system files on a special location for faster loading.
The outer disk spins at a different velocit than the inner disk.
Then, there used to be interleaving and whatnot..
I'm just a layman, after all.

Maybe capacity can be sacrificed for performance, too.
Like, storing multiple copies of the same DLLs across the whole drive.
That should increase access time, too.

Storing multiple copies across the same disk would cause other problems. Any time the file is updated, it would have to be updated everywhere.

There is the opposite of that though.
Deduplication. It is mainly meant for file servers but you can use it on regular Windows as well.

When hard drives were still something tweakers liked to tweak, there was a thing called "short stroking". They would give up capacity in order to keep data on the outer tracks of the platters to both increase transfer rate and reduce access time. Which to me always sounded like what you get with one of the smarter defrag programs anyway.

NCQ was only tangibly beneficial for a hard disk under very specific use cases. It's great for SSDs however. NVMe takes that much farther.

The worst was buying low specified computers and they tend to have 4GB even less, and 1 head hard drive. This was the worst. Stepping up to 8GB and at least 2 heads hard drive boosted the performance so much and would not cost much if they choose the specs at purchase.

Believe me, I had collected old computers that was cast off from schools, commonly seen this low specs for fun and knew this. Poor teachers and students waiting for the slow grind to finish.

Cheers,

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?

Operating systems are a special case of the code bloat problem because even though there generally is some effort to keep code quality up, at the same time they are projects with unlimited scope. Everyone thinks the OS needs to update every week and incorporate everything imaginable. Throw in the kitchen sink, then the whole kitchen, then the whole neighborhood, then the whole solar system, and wonder why booting up is slow...

Jo22 wrote on 2022-06-10, 13:47:

But making SSDs a requirement isn't cool, IMHO. That's so single sided. Doing so will lock out physical RAM disks (essentially H […]
Show full quote

But making SSDs a requirement isn't cool, IMHO.
That's so single sided. Doing so will lock out physical RAM disks (essentially HDD emulators) that look like HDDs or certain VMs/emulators.
Some hybrid HDDs work quite nicely for booting, also.
Not just the Momentus XT type of HDDs with some pseudo AI,
but also certain SSHDs with its flash memory under OS control.
Windows Vista had introduced an API for that, if I remember correctly.

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 vast majority of people get an OEM copy of windows "free" with a new PC and the OEMs pay a tiny fraction of the retail price for those copies of Windows. So it would be far easier for Microsoft to add it to the OEM license agreement like they already do with some of the other hardware requirements. Some company can either sell the cheap OEM version on new computers with SSDs, or the expensive retail version on new computes with spinning rust.

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. And what is the lowest most terrible custom SSD (or EMMC?) the OEMs can come up with to maximize profits? 😁

But, SSDs, and particularly NVMe drives are still super-expensive compared to platter-based drives on a per-TB basis. It's an incredible act of effrontery and arrogance for MS to no longer suppord mechanical hard-drives.

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.

The limitation right now is an economic one, not a speed one. Everyone sees the benefit immediately in every system an SSD is installed in.

The even more serious problem is switching entirely to SSDs encourages no optimizations at all, this has been ongoing since at least Windows Vista days.

You want speed on a mechanical HD? Stick to Windows 10 LTSC. It's stripped down enough to run acceptably. Or better yet, go to DOS for a lightning -quick 3-5 second boot from even the most ancient machanical HD!

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.

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.

It's the *user's* perogative whether he wants to wait for the very slow hard drive boot, or not. MS is going Apple on us. Bad...

Microsoft is trying to stop OEMs specifically being cheap bastards. If you want to suffer on your own accord - nobody will stop you.

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

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.

It's the *user's* perogative whether he wants to wait for the very slow hard drive boot, or not. MS is going Apple on us. Bad...

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.