Bobbin

The weird thing is I could swear I've encountered PC's with mechanical drives that were performing acceptably on Windows 10 but unfortunately I haven't documented the differences. The intermittency of reports from people saying certain fixes have actually worked for them also lends curiosity. Not that an HDD ever performs great in comparison to an SSD, but that it at least still manages to open apps and be productive. @GoodBytes I think you might be onto something there though. If 5400RPM adoption somehow took over (I never honestly noticed), then this could explain the weird trend I've noticed. PC's never ever sucked this bad even back then unless something was actually wrong. I don't know if it is a case that I just got used to SSD's and it's a psychological thing, but that can surely be adding to my perception - it's also possible. Curious though, is it also perhaps the gradual increased size of storage space that reduces performance on a mechanical drive? (i.e. would a 500gig outperform a 1TB drive all others being equal? I imagine it obviously would?) EDIT: I googled this now and the answers are a bit all over the place, but generally it seems not really (with some caveats). Seems larger mechanical HDD's are actually faster too, so scratch that idea 1TB 5400RPM drive laptops are pretty standard in the retail market where I live. Hell even in the business sector (which drives me mad). Many suppliers seem to only sell stock SSD's with i7 spec laptops, so we always gotta do an after-market swap and clone/reinstall or pay extra for it to be done at the supplier.

I was just wondering what exactly it is that seems to drastically affect the performance of Windows 10 on mechanical drives as opposed to SSD's? And why other OS's don't seem to suffer the same issue (in my limited experience). Has anyone ever really investigated this in detail? I'm not talking about the obvious bump in performance one would expect from an SSD over an HDD, but that Windows 10 really seems to actually plummet to the point of unusability when paired with a consumer grade HDD. Is it just me that thinks this is unusual? Though this tends to happen more often with many 5400rpm drives I've encountered, I've seen complains with 7200rpm drives as well (Though it seems hit and miss). I imagine any technician who has deployed a lot of new PC's (I get the hunch it's particularly laptops with large storage that have the problem for some reason, maybe a combination of size/performance in these SFF drives) coming stock with Windows 10 + HDD and performing so poorly out of the box that one is often forced to do an immediate SSD upgrade, they've surely felt this trend start at some point (Were early Win 10 builds always as bad or is my memory failing me?). Hell, why do retailers even bother selling these laptops at this point (The inevitable SSD after-market sale I suppose makes better returns lol). I don't recall having to so strongly recommend SSD's to every PC off the shelf back when Win 10 launched, but now it's almost a sin not to. And I don't think that's just a perception, it's literally unusable in more recent times with an HDD. So is it just the case that Windows 10 is such a resource hog in reads/writes that SSD has become a staple recommendation for even the average user? Or is it a case that Windows 10 is inefficient or misconfigured somehow with standard mechanical drives (As the OS drive)? Or is it a driver issue? Or a hardware quality issue on common low budget laptops? I've seen a range of "fixes" that don't always work including disabling superfetch, updating controller drivers, disabling Windows Defender, regfixes etc... But there's surely some hard data that can point to the exact culprit or concern? The process or task running at which point Windows 10 really hogs 100% of the HDD almost all the time and cannot keep up. Could make an interesting LTT episode/investigation for a storage performance muggle like me. To muddy the waters sometimes people respond to these "fixes" to claim they have worked for them, but it's all over the place and very intermittent. I just have a hunch it's not just a performance thing, that there's more going on here, but maybe I'm wrong - also feels like I'm being a bit naive posting this. Just want to find out Or else, just upgrade to SSD (throw money at the problem). Don't get me wrong, I like SSD's. https://forums.tomshardware.com/threads/is-it-just-me-or-windows-10-is-a-lot-slower-on-hdds-than-its-predecessors.3127284/ https://gbatemp.net/threads/windows-10-hates-mechanical-drives.465058/ https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/forum/windows_10-hardware/hard-drive-became-super-slow-after-upgrading-to/4acee2b2-e31f-4358-a04f-56756bca75d6 https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/forum/all/windows-10-100-disk-usage-problem/4891900b-ace5-4bef-9eb4-3bac4c5ad4eb