16 ms·

Anyone finally willing to admit that w10 is unusable on Hard Drives while Linux and W7 work fine on them?

by boba7 5y ago

seniorThrowaway 5y ago
I have an older laptop with an hdd. It always was under powered but still usable for things like streaming to a tv every once in a while. The latest Win10 updates have it taking minutes to run a search or context switch. Feels like we are getting into phone territory of forced HW upgrades for everything now.
- boba7 5y ago
  I'm upgrading computers in my University with 8GB of ram and ssd and poof, 2011 computers run W10 just fine once again.
  - smhenderson 5y ago
    This was my experience as well updating computers at a company I recently joined. Changing to an SSD had the most impact, although a lot of these machines already had 8GB of RAM. There are still a handful around that now have an SSD but still 4GB of RAM they came with; these are also better now, usable anyway.
    - at-fates-hands 5y ago
      My company did the same thing a while back. I remember two years ago having to get in the office at least 20 minutes before my z book laptop would fully boot. They upgraded all the developer grade laptops with 32GB of RAM and SSD's. Still take a good 5-8 mins to boot, but compared to where they were? Light years better!
  - asdff 5y ago
    I did this to all my family members macbook pros a few years ago, back when apple let you do that sort of thing to your hardware. These machines are 10 years old and still running modern stuff just fine.
ocdtrekkie 5y ago
Yeah, Win10 is very drive performance dependent. You can run it fine on a Pentium 4, but you need an SSD.
- willis936 5y ago
  As someone who manages a fleet of 30 windows machines that house PCI DAQ cards: Windows 10 runs on a Pentium 4, but I wouldn't call it fine. All of the machines run on SSDs, which is a godsend, but the older machines that run pentiums involve a lot of waiting around to do the most basic of things. It doesn't help that Windows refuses to us less than 1.5 GB of RAM. You can forget web browsing.
  - boba7 5y ago
    I gave them Lubuntu and their scanner app running in WINE. It worked fine but they refused to switch because "it's not muh windows". This is how Microsoft corrupts people for life...
    - squarefoot 5y ago
      The sad irony being that the Windows UI, starting from Win8, became a complete mess, far more different from say Win7 or even XP than any recent Linux desktop manager. Most of my users, some even over 70 with little computer experience, are doing fine on Linux, but I "converted" them before they had to experience that awful mess, so it has been relatively easy: from XP or Win7 to a customized XFCE (its defaults are ugly and unpractical) has been a breeze.
      - squarefoot 5y ago
        > customized XFCE (its defaults are ugly and unpractical) Correction: Its defaults are ugly and unpractical on Debian. It looks a lot nicer on Manjaro for example.
c7DJTLrn 5y ago
I could be completely wrong, but my guess at the cause would be the registry. Every functionality and feature in Windows has a flag somewhere in the registry. Every query is probably a disk read, and it's a blocking operation of course. Sure, there's probably a cache, but that cache is only so large. There's a program that I can't recall the name of that can trace registry queries in the program it's attached to. You can attach to basically any process in Windows and see a monstrous number of registry queries.
- londons_explore 5y ago
  The registry is plenty small enough to keep the whole thing in RAM
- emily-c 5y ago
  A lot of critical system configuration is stored in the SYSTEM hive which isn't explicitly backed by a file mapping and is loaded at boot via firmware services so this will be fast as it is non-paged and mapped in kernel space for the entire boot session. On newer builds of Windows 10 other hives are memory mapped into the usermode address space of the minimal Registry process. Whenever you do a registry read the kernel will temporarily attach your thread to the Registry process' address space and the read to the UM mapped section will occur which will naturally fault in the data from disk. The requesting process' thread will then be unattached and the information will be returned. Since non-SYSTEM/ELAM hives are memory mapped the kernel's cache manager and memory manager subsystems are the ones that "own" and control the mapped memory. The file cache is tuned based on the particular system's hardware characteristics to be as performant as possible. There are registry-specific caches in between to reduce the need to attach to the Registry process but this isn't going to be a disk IO speed bottleneck. The program you're thinking of is procmon which is a part of the Sysinternals suite of tools.
smoldesu 5y ago
Definitely. Booting up Win10 on an HDD can take up to 10 minutes if you have Discord/Steam installed.
- criddell 5y ago
  Why is that a Windows problem and not a Discord or Steam issue?
  - smoldesu 5y ago
    Well, in large part it has to do with how Windows loads libraries. For example, if you have two Electron apps running (eg. Discord and Slack), both will load separate libraries, effectively doubling their load on your system (scaling for each app you open). The solution is to enforce dynamic linking, like how Linux handles it. You can have Spotify, Discord and Slack all running on the same Electron library.
    - yjftsjthsd-h 5y ago
      Aren't they using bundled/vendored versions? The OS can't help that; it's like Snaps on Linux.
      - herbst 5y ago
        Which still do not increase the booting time like that
        yjftsjthsd-h 5y ago
        It will if you set them to launch on boot/login, which is probably the real difference (Windows has a tradition of apps auto starting, *nix has less).
    - kevingadd 5y ago
      This has nothing to do with Windows and everything to do with Discord and Slack deciding not to use dynamic linking.
toast0 5y ago
Yep. Windows 7 would sometimes take a few minutes to finish whatever boot time disk i/o it wanted to do; for Windows 10 on a disk, it seemed to always be doing some i/o and never settled down.
- rasz 5y ago
  Win10 is logging and tracelogging >100 separate useless things, just in case mothership would want to request them uploaded for telemetry purposes.
  - hnick 5y ago
    Every time I open Event Viewer I'm amazed at how many things are in there, and how exactly zero help with the problem I'm having.
jayd16 5y ago
Do people still think to defrag HDDs on windows? I wonder if that's an issue people are seeing.
- nullify88 5y ago
  Windows usually does it automatically as part of a maintenance routine. Unless you were writing and deleting lots of files causing fragmentation, there isnt usually much to gain with manual runs.
- Arainach 5y ago
  You haven't needed to manually defragment hard drives in Windows in decades.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - zokula 5y ago
    Yes you do. In fact in Windows/NTFS you can lose gigs of space from disk fragmentation.
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
    - Arainach 5y ago
      The system does it automatically and has since at least Vista, probably XP. Furthermore, there's no benefit (and in fact active harm) to defragging an SSD.
      - nix23 5y ago
        He talks about HD's, on Windows 10 you cant de-frag ssd's just optimize, aka trim. But de-frag HD's is often needed on windows in certain work scenarios.
moth-fuzz 5y ago
This has been precisely my experience. Windows 7 was fast on an HDD and blazing fast on a SSD. Windows 10 is unusable on an HDD and usable on an SSD. Still kinda sluggish, even then, for what it's worth. Not to mention the applications. A slow operating system that uses so much resources merely idling plus Applications-That-Are-Actually-Web-Browsers make day to day usage almost innavigable for someone with quick reflexes used to a Linux CLI.
- samplatt 5y ago
  >almost innavigable for someone with quick reflexes My few short years with Windows 3.1+ spoiled me for all future versions of windows. Instant closing, instant alt-tabbing, double-clicking the top-left corner icon to close, (nearly) instant opening of simple apps like File Manager and Notepad... not to mention the instant crashes. Linux got close but still always felt clunky, while future versions of Windows and MacOS just kept abstracting themselves from my tactile sensation farther and farther away...
  - kroltan 5y ago
    Right? I opened a Windows XP VM inside my 10 box a bit ago to play an old game, and oh boy was that incredibly snappy compared to what we have now. Sure, it's running in anachronistic hardware, but where did we go wrong? 3.1 was before my time, but I can imagine.
    - skydhash 5y ago
      I started with XP with a pentium 2 then move to a pentium 4. It ran perfectly on both. It started even faster than my Linux Mint installation.
      - josephg 5y ago
        That’s wild. I remember when windows XP came out I was amazed it was so large. The OS was 300 megabytes or something - and it took up a significant portion of my computer’s hard drive. Despite all of Microsoft’s claims about “media enhancements” it seemed horribly bloated and ugly. It was the embarrassing stepchild of windows 2000 - which I still adore. How times have changed!
1_player 5y ago
Why do people still expect modern software to run at incredible speeds on hard disk drives? Run old technology with old software. It is ridiculous that consumer hardware is still being sold with crappy 5400 RPM disks in 2021. No, I have no interest in optimising my software for speeds that are 1/10th of my broadband. Unless we're talking archival or huge storage necessities, stop complaining about modern OS or games running slow on a technology that hasn't realistically been updated in 20 years. Do you expect Windows 10 to run on a Pentium II with 512MB RAM as well, because some version of Linux does?
- jandrese 5y ago
  My Linux box runs totally find on spinning drives. I'd like to upgrade but SSDs have gotten very expensive lately. A 2TB SSD is like $300 now.
  - 1_player 5y ago
    My 486 ran totally fine on 1.44MB floppy disks as well, what is your point? As I mentioned down thread, you can get 1TB Samsung SSDs right now for $80. Not the best one, still faster than a hard disk. NVMe are a little more expensive than that, and even faster. The price is not really a valid excuse. Yes, my 2TB NVMe is $300, and does sequential read/writes of 3,000 MB/s, which is close to 100x faster than an HDD. It's not space age technology, solid state storage has been consumer technology for 2 decades already.
    - at-fates-hands 5y ago
      >> As I mentioned down thread, you can get 1TB Samsung SSDs right now for $80. You ever think about the college kid who can't afford that price? What about the family of five living on food stamps who can't just pony up the money for better hardware? What about large swaths of the population who are on fixed incomes? The way software companies are going and your general attitude is, "Eh, this is old technology, anybody should be able to afford it, what's the big deal?" Totally tone deaf to the poor and people living on the edge and others living on a fixed income. My mother in law is pushing 80 and I had to build her a new PC since she couldn't afford to purchase a new desktop to do her taxes on since now our state requires you to file electronically and shockingly, her tax software no longer runs on her 8 year old desktop.
dangus 5y ago
Windows 7 is 12 years old now. Spinning hard drives are 100% dead in the consumer market. Why in the world would a modern operating system not optimize for SSDs? I can’t think of a single reason to use a spinning drive on my computer. Almost every conceivable use case is better relegated to a separate NAS box. You can get a 1TB PCIe nvme SSD rated at 3100Mbps read speeds for $125. Why would I chip off an order of magnitude of performance to save $40?
- metalforever 5y ago
  I still use them for NAS use because you get a bit of "notice" before the data goes down, and costs at this level makes spinning disks make sense.
- fredsted 5y ago
  The thing is, computers with SSDs feel about as fast as computers were with HDDs 12 years ago. Some apps still take 10 seconds or more to load on brand new hardware in 2021. There shouldn't be any random wait times in daily usage. Sure, things have gotten more advanced, but it feels like the speed improvements of hardware are being used for bloat, rather than making computers even faster. It seems computer performance stabilizes at a level that's acceptable to most people, I guess because beyond that there's no incentive to spend resources improving something that's acceptable.
  - dangus 5y ago
    I’d love find some hardware along with period-appropriate software and run tests to debunk or support your idea. I still just don’t buy it, but it’s hard to find quantitative evidence without just going out and trying it. By the way, 10 seconds clocked on a stopwatch is a ridiculously long time. Almost no apps open that slowly, in 2009 or 2021.
- michaelmrose 5y ago
  You actually need 2x whatever you have if you want to still have it if the drive its in dies or the data is destroyed by malice or mischance. Say you have 3TB of data now and may acquire more later. Your cheapest SSD option I see for sale on newegg.com is 4TB for $322. Going all SSD all the time requires one to spend $644. Storing the same data on a hard drive can be had for about $140. Now the SSD is much safer for your data, performs far better, and you absolutely ought to want the SSD but its not a small difference once you start talking about storing more than your OS. Spinning hard drives as OS drives ought to be completely dead by now but vendors are absolutely selling machines configured with them new in box all day every day. Seemingly more so on desktop or all in one models.
brudgers 5y ago
I won't disagree, or agree. If you are running spinning rust rather than an SSD, you are getting exactly what you chose. Just about any use case that justifies spinning rust can be solved with an external platter, thumbdrive, and/or SD card.
- mulmen 5y ago
  When I upgraded from 7 to 10 I had an SSD in my machine but was never given an option to install 10 to the SSD. It requires some contortions to get physical install media and then start over on a new install on the SSD instead of doing any kind of convenient system migration. The "choice" I made was back in 2009 when I installed 7 to an HDD, which seems like a reasonable choice.
  - brudgers 5y ago
    I have never had an issue installing Windows 10 to a machine I upgraded to an ssd…I had hell with an old Dell Precision workstation because of the built in RAID controller…but that’s another story…and when I upgraded that machine to W7 from XP 64 bit, I bought new spinning rust for it. But W8 went smooth and I got W10 working by disabling the RAID during install (I used an SSD for boot). That machine, with dual e5405’s is still in service for gaming at my kid’s place. Physical install media for 10 is a matter of downloading an .exe and selecting the option for making a thumb drive as the installation disk and then booting from it. It’s relatively straight forward but there are a few moving parts for sure. Typically f12 to select boot device. 2009 was a long time ago in tech terms.
    - mulmen 5y ago
      This was the "free" upgrade to 10 from 7. It only offered in-place upgrades. I didn't want to go through the pain of an actual fresh install. I don't really understand why Microsoft couldn't (didn't) give the option to install to a new drive while upgrading.
      - brudgers 5y ago
ergot_vacation 5y ago
People must have very different performance requirements than me. I've run 10 on nothing but HDD for years now with no issues. Of course, I also avoid electron apps, modify Firefox so it doesn't eat memory like an addict on a bender, and generally keep bloat off my system. But Windows, basic Multimedia programs and games all seem to run fine. It's probably not cutting edge, but I don't feel like it's dragging.
- chipotle_coyote 5y ago
  > modify Firefox so it doesn't eat memory like an addict on a bender Are these Windows-specific modifications, or tuning Firefox settings that might be beneficial on other platforms? (I'm not saying that I'm looking at the insane UI changes for the upcoming Safari release on the Mac and investigating other options, but I'm not not saying that.)
  - handrous 5y ago
    > I'm not saying that I'm looking at the insane UI changes for the upcoming Safari release on the Mac and investigating other options, but I'm not not saying that. You and everyone else. I'm just taking a wait-and-see approach, on the off chance the new tab categorization stuff makes the new design usable. Otherwise, I'll have to trade a couple hours of battery life and some overall system performance and switch to... something else. Probably FF or a light alternative Webkit browser. Hell, there's hardly a task I do that doesn't put me at at least 10 open tabs, which is already too many for the new design, then if someone comes along and says "hey can you take a look at X real quick", well, now I might be at or over 20 (I find multi-window browsing horribly obtuse unless I have 3+ monitors). And you know what? I'm not always great about closing all my tabs the second I finish a task, and I don't really want to have to do that. We'll see how it works, but I'm not optimistic. It looks batshit crazy. I can imagine something involving a highly-capable quick-search-to-find-tab system making it better than what we have now, or at least not-worse, but dunno whether they'll be including anything like that.
    - prower 5y ago
jokoon 5y ago
Totally. Back in 2020, after one update, windows 10 was taking about 5min to boot on a thinkpad, if not more. Had to install a SSD, changed everything. Pretty curious to hear what kernel developer or filesystem developers have to say about this, because it doesn't really make sense to me. I can understand why something would stop working, but not to just become slow. In what world does a system change result in worse performance in certain cases? Maybe deep inside, w10 stopped using any optimization that allowed it to be fast on HDD, considering SSD should be the norm, but I fail to understand if this is choice that implies a difficult compromise, or if it's just laziness and negligence. Any linux dev could chime in?
- brundolf 5y ago
  I've heard that modern Windows does some aggressive disk-caching of driver states or something (?) when you shut down, so that it can quickly load them when you boot again and skip a large part of the booting process. Obviously the intention is to make boot faster, but maybe on an HDD it has the opposite effect?
  - easton 5y ago
    It actually is the opposite of what you say, in that the Fast Boot feature of Windows 10 is basically logging you out then hibernating the system, which is faster on HDDs but slower on SSDs (or at best the same speed of a cold boot, but at the expense of system stability in the long term since NT really likes its reboots). It's really odd, because the first couple releases of Windows 10 were fast enough on HDDs, but post 1703 is when I started to really notice it.
    - scns 5y ago
      It is possible to disable fastboot in the system settings. You need to do it if you want to dual boot linux.
  - handrous 5y ago
    More than just on boot. For the brief time that I ran Win10 on an HDD, what it felt like was that the whole OS was almost constantly touching the disk, for whatever reason, often blocking. Open start menu? Better do a bunch of disk I/O. Moused over anything? Touch the disk. Pressed a key? Hit disk. Doing nothing? Disk time! Whatever they're doing is probably fine, for very liberal values of "fine" (i.e. it's not actually fine and is probably harming system-wide performance and UX in more subtle ways, even on SSDs) for SSD-equipped systems, but made it practically unusable on an HDD.
marcosdumay 5y ago
Win10 is perfectly fine on HDDs. You just have to install Linux on the bare metal, and create a Win10 VM leaving at least 3GB of RAM to the Linux caches. This is faster than W10 on bare metal with SSD and the same physical amount of RAM.
- nso 5y ago
  Why is this?
  - marcosdumay 5y ago
    I have a little idea. I know Windows does a lot of useless disk access¹, but I never thought it was localized before I tried a VM. I always assumed it was random, but it looks like it's kinda random, but all over the same small area, and Windows can't optimize it for some reason. Anyway, if you do that, you better keep those ~3GB free. If you don't have enough cache things break down really fast. 1 - It is for cortana, file indexing, telemetry, and etc. If you take the time to disable them, your computer will get much faster... for about a week, until it updates again.
    - toast0 5y ago
      While we're spitballing, from my recollection, it seems to do a lot of small writes; probably different write cache policies, possibly including the VM not passing through fsync/write barriers. And, you know, organizational failure to have this issue lingering.
  - ShroudedNight 5y ago
    I'm pretty sure a lot of this is telemetry related. Resmon will frequently show ETW (Event Tracing for Windows) files getting a detrimental quantity of I/O directed their way, especially at boot...
    - rightbyte 5y ago
      Ye sometimes my Win10 computer slows down alot and there is some telemetry service in the tasklist hogging like 5% CPU. The malware service is also a thief. I mean they could just make those run at like 1/5 speed and it would be fine. Add some sleep() ...
lvass 5y ago
Absolutely true. I've converted more people to GNU/Linux over the last two years than in the twenty years before that. The vast majority of people in my (third world) country do not have SSDs, so GNU/Linux is their only hope of having an usable and moderately secure machine.
afturkrull 5y ago
> Anyone finally willing to admit that w10 is unusable on Hard Drives while Linux and W7 work fine on them? Well if you ignore the one and a half second delay before typed text appears on screen, it's usable :]
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
tester756 5y ago
but why we should care about this? insanely fast NVMe M2 disks are cheap, let alone normal SSDs.
- HKH2 5y ago
  The OS is for the system, not the system the OS. Besides, if everyone bought faster storage, would that get people to write more efficient software?
edgyquant 5y ago
Maybe this is true, I installed Ubuntu on a hard drive not long ago and immediately bought an SSD. Apt installing build-essentials was a slog but takes like 20-30 seconds on an SSD. I guess you mean using the GUI but I don’t think I could go back to using any OS on an HDD.
stuaxo 5y ago
Wow, tried it on friends laptop that I was going to put an SSD in and it was an absolute joke.
yyyk 5y ago
I don't have experience with W10+HDD, but note that modern HDDs have started to adopt SMR which can lead to slower writes. It's possible slowness comes from that direction and not just W10.
- darkfirefly 5y ago
  Not sure how modern you are referring too, but I have 2009-era hard drives which are very sluggish.
- formerly_proven 5y ago
  I have several DM-SMR drives and their write cache (when not completely full) is like 50-100 GB large. As long as you don't write more than that in one go it performs exactly like a normal hard drive of their stature. When they're idle they'll merge the write cache into the main SMR region. Sequential writes mostly end up going straight to the SMR region (there is no idle-reorganization after them). SMR is also only used in fairly high capacity drives. A 1/2/4 TB drive wouldn't be SMR.
  - yyyk 5y ago
    >SMR is also only used in fairly high capacity drives. A 1/2/4 TB drive wouldn't be SMR. I thought so too, until I bought a 2TB and discovered it's SMR. It turns out there are quite a few 4TB SMRs, and also 2TB and even 1TB SMRs. e.g. https://www.truenas.com/community/resources/list-of-known-smr-drives.141/ https://www.truenas.com/community/resources/list-of-known-sm...
Superblazer 5y ago
It is absolutely unusable, I was shocked to see how good Linux was when windows forced me to try another OS a few years ago
kiwijamo 5y ago
For what's its worth macOS had excatly the same issue. My previous $WORK laptop was a HDD based model and all of a sudden after a macOS upgrade it was slow as heck. I can't recall the exact release but it was certainty very noticeable right after I applied a major upgrade. I was so happy when $WORK finally upgraded it to a SSD based model. I suspect OS developers pretty much target SSD machines and don't really bother to ensure there's no regressions on HDD machines. I also notice that Debian performs much better on SSD than HDD. So certainty not a Windows only issue.
michaelmrose 5y ago
This is true but honestly after using a fast SSD even linux on hard drive feels unacceptably sluggish by comparison.
signal11 5y ago
Not a perfect comparison, but I have a Windows 10 box I built with a small M2 NVMe SSD boot drive, but a lot of apps -- including notably Steam games, OneDrive, and the browser Downloads folder -- runs off a larger 7200rpm hard drive. I've never felt any slowness and everything is blazing fast. It's got 16GB RAM, though. I know a lot of cheap machines have 5400rpm hard drives, I wonder if 7200rpm+ drives will offer a better experience. Also what role RAM plays in user experience.

Anyone finally willing to admit that w10 is unusable on Hard Drives while Linux and W7 work fine on them?

by boba7 5y ago

Anyone finally willing to admit that w10 is unusable on Hard Drives while Linux and W7 work fine on them?

I have an older laptop with an hdd. It always was under powered but still usable for things like streaming to a tv every once in a while. The latest Win10 updates have it taking minutes to run a search or context switch. Feels like we are getting into phone territory of forced HW upgrades for everything now.

boba7 5y ago
I'm upgrading computers in my University with 8GB of ram and ssd and poof, 2011 computers run W10 just fine once again.
- smhenderson 5y ago
  This was my experience as well updating computers at a company I recently joined. Changing to an SSD had the most impact, although a lot of these machines already had 8GB of RAM. There are still a handful around that now have an SSD but still 4GB of RAM they came with; these are also better now, usable anyway.
  - at-fates-hands 5y ago
    My company did the same thing a while back. I remember two years ago having to get in the office at least 20 minutes before my z book laptop would fully boot. They upgraded all the developer grade laptops with 32GB of RAM and SSD's. Still take a good 5-8 mins to boot, but compared to where they were? Light years better!
- asdff 5y ago
  I did this to all my family members macbook pros a few years ago, back when apple let you do that sort of thing to your hardware. These machines are 10 years old and still running modern stuff just fine.

ocdtrekkie 5y ago

Yeah, Win10 is very drive performance dependent. You can run it fine on a Pentium 4, but you need an SSD.

willis936 5y ago
As someone who manages a fleet of 30 windows machines that house PCI DAQ cards: Windows 10 runs on a Pentium 4, but I wouldn't call it fine. All of the machines run on SSDs, which is a godsend, but the older machines that run pentiums involve a lot of waiting around to do the most basic of things. It doesn't help that Windows refuses to us less than 1.5 GB of RAM. You can forget web browsing.
- boba7 5y ago
  I gave them Lubuntu and their scanner app running in WINE. It worked fine but they refused to switch because "it's not muh windows". This is how Microsoft corrupts people for life...
  - squarefoot 5y ago
    The sad irony being that the Windows UI, starting from Win8, became a complete mess, far more different from say Win7 or even XP than any recent Linux desktop manager. Most of my users, some even over 70 with little computer experience, are doing fine on Linux, but I "converted" them before they had to experience that awful mess, so it has been relatively easy: from XP or Win7 to a customized XFCE (its defaults are ugly and unpractical) has been a breeze.
    - squarefoot 5y ago
      > customized XFCE (its defaults are ugly and unpractical) Correction: Its defaults are ugly and unpractical on Debian. It looks a lot nicer on Manjaro for example.

c7DJTLrn 5y ago

I could be completely wrong, but my guess at the cause would be the registry. Every functionality and feature in Windows has a flag somewhere in the registry. Every query is probably a disk read, and it's a blocking operation of course. Sure, there's probably a cache, but that cache is only so large. There's a program that I can't recall the name of that can trace registry queries in the program it's attached to. You can attach to basically any process in Windows and see a monstrous number of registry queries.

londons_explore 5y ago
The registry is plenty small enough to keep the whole thing in RAM
emily-c 5y ago
A lot of critical system configuration is stored in the SYSTEM hive which isn't explicitly backed by a file mapping and is loaded at boot via firmware services so this will be fast as it is non-paged and mapped in kernel space for the entire boot session. On newer builds of Windows 10 other hives are memory mapped into the usermode address space of the minimal Registry process. Whenever you do a registry read the kernel will temporarily attach your thread to the Registry process' address space and the read to the UM mapped section will occur which will naturally fault in the data from disk. The requesting process' thread will then be unattached and the information will be returned. Since non-SYSTEM/ELAM hives are memory mapped the kernel's cache manager and memory manager subsystems are the ones that "own" and control the mapped memory. The file cache is tuned based on the particular system's hardware characteristics to be as performant as possible. There are registry-specific caches in between to reduce the need to attach to the Registry process but this isn't going to be a disk IO speed bottleneck. The program you're thinking of is procmon which is a part of the Sysinternals suite of tools.

smoldesu 5y ago

Definitely. Booting up Win10 on an HDD can take up to 10 minutes if you have Discord/Steam installed.

criddell 5y ago
Why is that a Windows problem and not a Discord or Steam issue?
- smoldesu 5y ago
  Well, in large part it has to do with how Windows loads libraries. For example, if you have two Electron apps running (eg. Discord and Slack), both will load separate libraries, effectively doubling their load on your system (scaling for each app you open). The solution is to enforce dynamic linking, like how Linux handles it. You can have Spotify, Discord and Slack all running on the same Electron library.
  - yjftsjthsd-h 5y ago
    Aren't they using bundled/vendored versions? The OS can't help that; it's like Snaps on Linux.
    - herbst 5y ago
      Which still do not increase the booting time like that
      - yjftsjthsd-h 5y ago
        It will if you set them to launch on boot/login, which is probably the real difference (Windows has a tradition of apps auto starting, *nix has less).
  - kevingadd 5y ago
    This has nothing to do with Windows and everything to do with Discord and Slack deciding not to use dynamic linking.

toast0 5y ago

Yep. Windows 7 would sometimes take a few minutes to finish whatever boot time disk i/o it wanted to do; for Windows 10 on a disk, it seemed to always be doing some i/o and never settled down.

rasz 5y ago
Win10 is logging and tracelogging >100 separate useless things, just in case mothership would want to request them uploaded for telemetry purposes.
- hnick 5y ago
  Every time I open Event Viewer I'm amazed at how many things are in there, and how exactly zero help with the problem I'm having.

jayd16 5y ago

Do people still think to defrag HDDs on windows? I wonder if that's an issue people are seeing.

nullify88 5y ago
Windows usually does it automatically as part of a maintenance routine. Unless you were writing and deleting lots of files causing fragmentation, there isnt usually much to gain with manual runs.
Arainach 5y ago
You haven't needed to manually defragment hard drives in Windows in decades.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- zokula 5y ago
  Yes you do. In fact in Windows/NTFS you can lose gigs of space from disk fragmentation.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - Arainach 5y ago
    The system does it automatically and has since at least Vista, probably XP. Furthermore, there's no benefit (and in fact active harm) to defragging an SSD.
    - nix23 5y ago
      He talks about HD's, on Windows 10 you cant de-frag ssd's just optimize, aka trim. But de-frag HD's is often needed on windows in certain work scenarios.

moth-fuzz 5y ago

This has been precisely my experience. Windows 7 was fast on an HDD and blazing fast on a SSD. Windows 10 is unusable on an HDD and usable on an SSD. Still kinda sluggish, even then, for what it's worth. Not to mention the applications. A slow operating system that uses so much resources merely idling plus Applications-That-Are-Actually-Web-Browsers make day to day usage almost innavigable for someone with quick reflexes used to a Linux CLI.

samplatt 5y ago
>almost innavigable for someone with quick reflexes My few short years with Windows 3.1+ spoiled me for all future versions of windows. Instant closing, instant alt-tabbing, double-clicking the top-left corner icon to close, (nearly) instant opening of simple apps like File Manager and Notepad... not to mention the instant crashes. Linux got close but still always felt clunky, while future versions of Windows and MacOS just kept abstracting themselves from my tactile sensation farther and farther away...
- kroltan 5y ago
  Right? I opened a Windows XP VM inside my 10 box a bit ago to play an old game, and oh boy was that incredibly snappy compared to what we have now. Sure, it's running in anachronistic hardware, but where did we go wrong? 3.1 was before my time, but I can imagine.
  - skydhash 5y ago
    I started with XP with a pentium 2 then move to a pentium 4. It ran perfectly on both. It started even faster than my Linux Mint installation.
    - josephg 5y ago
      That’s wild. I remember when windows XP came out I was amazed it was so large. The OS was 300 megabytes or something - and it took up a significant portion of my computer’s hard drive. Despite all of Microsoft’s claims about “media enhancements” it seemed horribly bloated and ugly. It was the embarrassing stepchild of windows 2000 - which I still adore. How times have changed!

1_player 5y ago

Why do people still expect modern software to run at incredible speeds on hard disk drives? Run old technology with old software. It is ridiculous that consumer hardware is still being sold with crappy 5400 RPM disks in 2021. No, I have no interest in optimising my software for speeds that are 1/10th of my broadband. Unless we're talking archival or huge storage necessities, stop complaining about modern OS or games running slow on a technology that hasn't realistically been updated in 20 years. Do you expect Windows 10 to run on a Pentium II with 512MB RAM as well, because some version of Linux does?

jandrese 5y ago
My Linux box runs totally find on spinning drives. I'd like to upgrade but SSDs have gotten very expensive lately. A 2TB SSD is like $300 now.
- 1_player 5y ago
  My 486 ran totally fine on 1.44MB floppy disks as well, what is your point? As I mentioned down thread, you can get 1TB Samsung SSDs right now for $80. Not the best one, still faster than a hard disk. NVMe are a little more expensive than that, and even faster. The price is not really a valid excuse. Yes, my 2TB NVMe is $300, and does sequential read/writes of 3,000 MB/s, which is close to 100x faster than an HDD. It's not space age technology, solid state storage has been consumer technology for 2 decades already.
  - at-fates-hands 5y ago
    >> As I mentioned down thread, you can get 1TB Samsung SSDs right now for $80. You ever think about the college kid who can't afford that price? What about the family of five living on food stamps who can't just pony up the money for better hardware? What about large swaths of the population who are on fixed incomes? The way software companies are going and your general attitude is, "Eh, this is old technology, anybody should be able to afford it, what's the big deal?" Totally tone deaf to the poor and people living on the edge and others living on a fixed income. My mother in law is pushing 80 and I had to build her a new PC since she couldn't afford to purchase a new desktop to do her taxes on since now our state requires you to file electronically and shockingly, her tax software no longer runs on her 8 year old desktop.

dangus 5y ago

Windows 7 is 12 years old now. Spinning hard drives are 100% dead in the consumer market. Why in the world would a modern operating system not optimize for SSDs? I can’t think of a single reason to use a spinning drive on my computer. Almost every conceivable use case is better relegated to a separate NAS box. You can get a 1TB PCIe nvme SSD rated at 3100Mbps read speeds for $125. Why would I chip off an order of magnitude of performance to save $40?

metalforever 5y ago
I still use them for NAS use because you get a bit of "notice" before the data goes down, and costs at this level makes spinning disks make sense.
fredsted 5y ago
The thing is, computers with SSDs feel about as fast as computers were with HDDs 12 years ago. Some apps still take 10 seconds or more to load on brand new hardware in 2021. There shouldn't be any random wait times in daily usage. Sure, things have gotten more advanced, but it feels like the speed improvements of hardware are being used for bloat, rather than making computers even faster. It seems computer performance stabilizes at a level that's acceptable to most people, I guess because beyond that there's no incentive to spend resources improving something that's acceptable.
- dangus 5y ago
  I’d love find some hardware along with period-appropriate software and run tests to debunk or support your idea. I still just don’t buy it, but it’s hard to find quantitative evidence without just going out and trying it. By the way, 10 seconds clocked on a stopwatch is a ridiculously long time. Almost no apps open that slowly, in 2009 or 2021.
michaelmrose 5y ago
You actually need 2x whatever you have if you want to still have it if the drive its in dies or the data is destroyed by malice or mischance. Say you have 3TB of data now and may acquire more later. Your cheapest SSD option I see for sale on newegg.com is 4TB for $322. Going all SSD all the time requires one to spend $644. Storing the same data on a hard drive can be had for about $140. Now the SSD is much safer for your data, performs far better, and you absolutely ought to want the SSD but its not a small difference once you start talking about storing more than your OS. Spinning hard drives as OS drives ought to be completely dead by now but vendors are absolutely selling machines configured with them new in box all day every day. Seemingly more so on desktop or all in one models.

brudgers 5y ago

I won't disagree, or agree. If you are running spinning rust rather than an SSD, you are getting exactly what you chose. Just about any use case that justifies spinning rust can be solved with an external platter, thumbdrive, and/or SD card.

mulmen 5y ago
When I upgraded from 7 to 10 I had an SSD in my machine but was never given an option to install 10 to the SSD. It requires some contortions to get physical install media and then start over on a new install on the SSD instead of doing any kind of convenient system migration. The "choice" I made was back in 2009 when I installed 7 to an HDD, which seems like a reasonable choice.
- brudgers 5y ago
  I have never had an issue installing Windows 10 to a machine I upgraded to an ssd…I had hell with an old Dell Precision workstation because of the built in RAID controller…but that’s another story…and when I upgraded that machine to W7 from XP 64 bit, I bought new spinning rust for it. But W8 went smooth and I got W10 working by disabling the RAID during install (I used an SSD for boot). That machine, with dual e5405’s is still in service for gaming at my kid’s place. Physical install media for 10 is a matter of downloading an .exe and selecting the option for making a thumb drive as the installation disk and then booting from it. It’s relatively straight forward but there are a few moving parts for sure. Typically f12 to select boot device. 2009 was a long time ago in tech terms.
  - mulmen 5y ago
    This was the "free" upgrade to 10 from 7. It only offered in-place upgrades. I didn't want to go through the pain of an actual fresh install. I don't really understand why Microsoft couldn't (didn't) give the option to install to a new drive while upgrading.
    - brudgers 5y ago

ergot_vacation 5y ago

People must have very different performance requirements than me. I've run 10 on nothing but HDD for years now with no issues. Of course, I also avoid electron apps, modify Firefox so it doesn't eat memory like an addict on a bender, and generally keep bloat off my system. But Windows, basic Multimedia programs and games all seem to run fine. It's probably not cutting edge, but I don't feel like it's dragging.

chipotle_coyote 5y ago
> modify Firefox so it doesn't eat memory like an addict on a bender Are these Windows-specific modifications, or tuning Firefox settings that might be beneficial on other platforms? (I'm not saying that I'm looking at the insane UI changes for the upcoming Safari release on the Mac and investigating other options, but I'm not not saying that.)
- handrous 5y ago
  > I'm not saying that I'm looking at the insane UI changes for the upcoming Safari release on the Mac and investigating other options, but I'm not not saying that. You and everyone else. I'm just taking a wait-and-see approach, on the off chance the new tab categorization stuff makes the new design usable. Otherwise, I'll have to trade a couple hours of battery life and some overall system performance and switch to... something else. Probably FF or a light alternative Webkit browser. Hell, there's hardly a task I do that doesn't put me at at least 10 open tabs, which is already too many for the new design, then if someone comes along and says "hey can you take a look at X real quick", well, now I might be at or over 20 (I find multi-window browsing horribly obtuse unless I have 3+ monitors). And you know what? I'm not always great about closing all my tabs the second I finish a task, and I don't really want to have to do that. We'll see how it works, but I'm not optimistic. It looks batshit crazy. I can imagine something involving a highly-capable quick-search-to-find-tab system making it better than what we have now, or at least not-worse, but dunno whether they'll be including anything like that.
  - prower 5y ago

jokoon 5y ago

Totally. Back in 2020, after one update, windows 10 was taking about 5min to boot on a thinkpad, if not more. Had to install a SSD, changed everything. Pretty curious to hear what kernel developer or filesystem developers have to say about this, because it doesn't really make sense to me. I can understand why something would stop working, but not to just become slow. In what world does a system change result in worse performance in certain cases? Maybe deep inside, w10 stopped using any optimization that allowed it to be fast on HDD, considering SSD should be the norm, but I fail to understand if this is choice that implies a difficult compromise, or if it's just laziness and negligence. Any linux dev could chime in?

brundolf 5y ago
I've heard that modern Windows does some aggressive disk-caching of driver states or something (?) when you shut down, so that it can quickly load them when you boot again and skip a large part of the booting process. Obviously the intention is to make boot faster, but maybe on an HDD it has the opposite effect?
- easton 5y ago
  It actually is the opposite of what you say, in that the Fast Boot feature of Windows 10 is basically logging you out then hibernating the system, which is faster on HDDs but slower on SSDs (or at best the same speed of a cold boot, but at the expense of system stability in the long term since NT really likes its reboots). It's really odd, because the first couple releases of Windows 10 were fast enough on HDDs, but post 1703 is when I started to really notice it.
  - scns 5y ago
    It is possible to disable fastboot in the system settings. You need to do it if you want to dual boot linux.
- handrous 5y ago
  More than just on boot. For the brief time that I ran Win10 on an HDD, what it felt like was that the whole OS was almost constantly touching the disk, for whatever reason, often blocking. Open start menu? Better do a bunch of disk I/O. Moused over anything? Touch the disk. Pressed a key? Hit disk. Doing nothing? Disk time! Whatever they're doing is probably fine, for very liberal values of "fine" (i.e. it's not actually fine and is probably harming system-wide performance and UX in more subtle ways, even on SSDs) for SSD-equipped systems, but made it practically unusable on an HDD.

marcosdumay 5y ago

Win10 is perfectly fine on HDDs. You just have to install Linux on the bare metal, and create a Win10 VM leaving at least 3GB of RAM to the Linux caches. This is faster than W10 on bare metal with SSD and the same physical amount of RAM.

nso 5y ago
Why is this?
- marcosdumay 5y ago
  I have a little idea. I know Windows does a lot of useless disk access¹, but I never thought it was localized before I tried a VM. I always assumed it was random, but it looks like it's kinda random, but all over the same small area, and Windows can't optimize it for some reason. Anyway, if you do that, you better keep those ~3GB free. If you don't have enough cache things break down really fast. 1 - It is for cortana, file indexing, telemetry, and etc. If you take the time to disable them, your computer will get much faster... for about a week, until it updates again.
  - toast0 5y ago
    While we're spitballing, from my recollection, it seems to do a lot of small writes; probably different write cache policies, possibly including the VM not passing through fsync/write barriers. And, you know, organizational failure to have this issue lingering.
- ShroudedNight 5y ago
  I'm pretty sure a lot of this is telemetry related. Resmon will frequently show ETW (Event Tracing for Windows) files getting a detrimental quantity of I/O directed their way, especially at boot...
  - rightbyte 5y ago
    Ye sometimes my Win10 computer slows down alot and there is some telemetry service in the tasklist hogging like 5% CPU. The malware service is also a thief. I mean they could just make those run at like 1/5 speed and it would be fine. Add some sleep() ...

lvass 5y ago

Absolutely true. I've converted more people to GNU/Linux over the last two years than in the twenty years before that. The vast majority of people in my (third world) country do not have SSDs, so GNU/Linux is their only hope of having an usable and moderately secure machine.

afturkrull 5y ago

> Anyone finally willing to admit that w10 is unusable on Hard Drives while Linux and W7 work fine on them? Well if you ignore the one and a half second delay before typed text appears on screen, it's usable :]

deleted 5y ago

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tester756 5y ago

but why we should care about this? insanely fast NVMe M2 disks are cheap, let alone normal SSDs.

HKH2 5y ago
The OS is for the system, not the system the OS. Besides, if everyone bought faster storage, would that get people to write more efficient software?

edgyquant 5y ago

Maybe this is true, I installed Ubuntu on a hard drive not long ago and immediately bought an SSD. Apt installing build-essentials was a slog but takes like 20-30 seconds on an SSD. I guess you mean using the GUI but I don’t think I could go back to using any OS on an HDD.

stuaxo 5y ago

Wow, tried it on friends laptop that I was going to put an SSD in and it was an absolute joke.

yyyk 5y ago

I don't have experience with W10+HDD, but note that modern HDDs have started to adopt SMR which can lead to slower writes. It's possible slowness comes from that direction and not just W10.

darkfirefly 5y ago
Not sure how modern you are referring too, but I have 2009-era hard drives which are very sluggish.
formerly_proven 5y ago
I have several DM-SMR drives and their write cache (when not completely full) is like 50-100 GB large. As long as you don't write more than that in one go it performs exactly like a normal hard drive of their stature. When they're idle they'll merge the write cache into the main SMR region. Sequential writes mostly end up going straight to the SMR region (there is no idle-reorganization after them). SMR is also only used in fairly high capacity drives. A 1/2/4 TB drive wouldn't be SMR.
- yyyk 5y ago
  >SMR is also only used in fairly high capacity drives. A 1/2/4 TB drive wouldn't be SMR. I thought so too, until I bought a 2TB and discovered it's SMR. It turns out there are quite a few 4TB SMRs, and also 2TB and even 1TB SMRs. e.g. https://www.truenas.com/community/resources/list-of-known-smr-drives.141/ https://www.truenas.com/community/resources/list-of-known-sm...

Superblazer 5y ago

It is absolutely unusable, I was shocked to see how good Linux was when windows forced me to try another OS a few years ago

kiwijamo 5y ago

For what's its worth macOS had excatly the same issue. My previous $WORK laptop was a HDD based model and all of a sudden after a macOS upgrade it was slow as heck. I can't recall the exact release but it was certainty very noticeable right after I applied a major upgrade. I was so happy when $WORK finally upgraded it to a SSD based model. I suspect OS developers pretty much target SSD machines and don't really bother to ensure there's no regressions on HDD machines. I also notice that Debian performs much better on SSD than HDD. So certainty not a Windows only issue.

michaelmrose 5y ago

This is true but honestly after using a fast SSD even linux on hard drive feels unacceptably sluggish by comparison.

signal11 5y ago

Not a perfect comparison, but I have a Windows 10 box I built with a small M2 NVMe SSD boot drive, but a lot of apps -- including notably Steam games, OneDrive, and the browser Downloads folder -- runs off a larger 7200rpm hard drive. I've never felt any slowness and everything is blazing fast. It's got 16GB RAM, though. I know a lot of cheap machines have 5400rpm hard drives, I wonder if 7200rpm+ drives will offer a better experience. Also what role RAM plays in user experience.