> As an aside I get the feeling software is being written more and more to assume SSDs. I agree with this observation in general. I don't use VS Code in partic

> As an aside I get the feeling software is being written more and more to assume SSDs. I agree with this observation in general. I don't use VS Code in particular but you've given solid evidence of a seek-heavy/HDD-unfriendly workload. > My feeling is the VS code is spawning many threads which are each fighting each other for the disk. It's really, really poor. I agree this is a poor match to your hardware, but if you're saying this is evidence of poor engineering, I disagree. IDEs' most demanding customers are using high-core-count CPUs with SSDs and expect top performance with heavy workloads. So the Visual Studio team needs to make this fast, and I don't think they have much reason to care about HDD-based installations' performance. Most software developers won't have trouble affording SSDs to store their OS files and current project, and the ones that will aren't paying to drive IDE development either.