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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 consume

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.
    - jaywalk 5y ago
      So instead of helping her learn one of the many (free) web-based tax applications, you built her a new computer to run a new (paid) version of the tax software she was already using? How does that even make sense?
      - at-fates-hands 5y ago
        She tried several of the "Free" web based tax apps, and always had problems with them. And yeah, I built her a PC that could run a current version of the software she paid for. It makes sense when you want to help someone to use the software they already paid for, instead of pointing an elderly person to the web and saying, "See? They have FREE versions, go grab one and figure it on your own!" Sorry, but that to me is kind of a callous solution compared to what I did.
      - collaborative 5y ago
        At 80 many can't manage to learn anything new or different
  - Marsymars 5y ago
    > 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. I'd highlight IOPS. A $300 SSD is about 3000× faster than an HDD.
  - bscphil 5y ago
    > It's not space age technology, solid state storage has been consumer technology for 2 decades already. You're exaggerating. The first really plausible SSDs to appear in consumer PCs appeared in around 2006 or 2007, so maybe 15 years tops. For instance, Dell offered a computer with 32 GB of SSD storage in mid-2007. This was already not much storage at the time, and the drive alone cost over $500. This was arguably not a consumer affordable product at that price, and the laptops involved were actually the Latitude series (targeted to businesses) anyway. Apple followed this up in 2008 with a 64 GB SSD, but this was a $1000 upgrade. Suffice it to say that a vast majority of people were only buying (and could probably only afford to buy) computers with rotational drives well into the 2010s. Many of the computers they bought are still running today. Many affordable computers that shipped with Windows 10 still had rotational drives. It's absurd to overlook a whole class of people who can't, unlike the wealthy, upgrade their MacBooks every 2 or 3 years. They probably don't have MacBooks to begin with. Parents are passing old hardware between children like hand-me-downs. That's before you even leave the United States. I think your comment misses the point at a deeper level, which is that most people in this thread already have SSDs (I certainly do), but are disappointed that performance matters so little to many developers that they are fine with seeing software run at the same speed on today's insanely fast hardware that its predecessor did 20 years ago. Software is much more powerful than it was in the days of floppy disks, but it's not much more powerful than it was 15 years ago. We've seen a generational increase in performance, but we've wasted it. I think that's worth some disappointment.
- Leherenn 5y ago
  I've had massive issues with Ubuntu on a HDD. Every time a big file was added to disk (like a download), the indexing system would run and render the whole system unusable for minutes (100% disk and CPU). Upgrading to an SSD solved the issue.
  - zokula 5y ago
    That's an Ubuntu problem and not an Linux problem thank goodness.
    - astrange 5y ago
      That depends how good Linux's support for very-low-priority background tasks is. UNIX priorities don't handle this situation well because a low priority process is still technically immediately runnable and can cause priority inversions by clearing out all kinds of system caches that your foreground app was using.
- asdff 5y ago
  On my 2012 mbp I have the OS and software running on the SSD in the drive bay, and a beefy hdd in the disk slot for storage. I set this up back when a 256gb SSD was pretty expensive, but maybe that sort of strategy would work for you now that SSD prices have gone up again, having a fast drive for software and the system and a big drive for storage.
jokoon 5y ago
I don't understand this argument, could you explain why modern software cannot run on old hardware? It sounds like it's justifying planned obsolescence.
- 1_player 5y ago
  Can you explain why you expect modern software to run on old hardware first? Should I be surprised that my turn of the millennium PC can't even run Slack? Yes, in absolute terms it's a bit ridiculous, but we're not talking philosophy here, Moore's law is a thing and software has been getting more complex as hardware got faster. Deal with it. How is this news?
  - bionade24 5y ago
    There are Slack clients out there, which use a hundreth of the official one and they can run on these old machines, too. The problem aren't more ressource itensive features not possible before, but delivering a services we have for decades with way worse ressource usage because you can.
    - djrogers 5y ago
      > There are Slack clients out there, which use a hundreth of the official one and they can run on these old machines, too Uhh, care to share? Asking for a friend....
      - Marsymars 5y ago
        Maybe referring to Ripcord. I haven't used for Slack though, I don't know what Slack's position is on third-party clients - using them with Discord is liable to get you banned.
      - bionade24 5y ago
        Ripcord is the most advanced, SailSlack for SailfishOS and lots of CLI clients.
  - 5y ago
Zababa 5y ago
What exactly does "modern software" does that justifies needing the hardware to follow at such a pace?
- beckingz 5y ago
  It runs on more modern hardware. And has more adware!
Hammershaft 5y ago
> Why do people still expect modern software to run at incredible speeds on hard disk drives? Modern software usually doesn't run at incredible speeds on an nvme drive with top of the line hardware. Modern software is often just slow. What can I do on a modern operating system today that I couldn't do on a predecessor released 20 years ago? What justifies that Windows 10 feels slower to use then Windows XP while Windows 10 runs on hardware that is tens of thousands of times faster? Under this lens, what really defines modern software is slowness. Take away the advantage of orders of magnitude of hardware improvements and you would be left with something unusably slow.
- MereInterest 5y ago
  Exactly. I am of the opinion that anything that was possible in computing 15 years ago should be perceptibly instant today. There are obvious exceptions such as cross-continent communication being limited by the speed of light, but as a general rule. Instead, we get software that's written as if Dennard scaling were still occurring.
  - HeckFeck 5y ago
    When I was a child, I had a reverent wonder for technology and all it might do in the future. Realisations like this replaced that with a dry cynicism. My inner child is disappointed.
    - tremon 5y ago
      When I was a child, I was thinking how amazing it would be if I could store all my games floppy disk on a single, network-accessible drive so that I could access them all without installing and swapping them all the time. Nowadays I have a NAS that stores both the raw media and installation scripts for those games, and I have wine/dosbox/mame/mess startup scripts for many of them. Can't say that my inner child is disappointed about that, but building and curating that system took a lot more effort than I'd like to admit. I don't buy games that require online activation, because I can't store and play them the same way. My inner child is very disappointed about that.
windows2020 5y ago
Modern <noun> is mostly worse than <noun>.
yjftsjthsd-h 5y ago
> Do you expect Windows 10 to run on a Pentium II with 512MB RAM as well, because some version of Linux does? ...Yes? What is it doing that wouldn't fit in those constraints?
- 1_player 5y ago
  I do not absolutely get this obtuse question. It is not my place to justify why modern software is so inefficient, pointing the finger to Windows 10 in particular as if it's an outlier. Why are YOU using inefficient languages, heavyweight virtual machines, GB sized binaries, Electron and Javascript to write your applications? Why is your boss asking to add feature upon feature upon feature? There is a reason we're in this place, but until then, my point is, stop complaining everything is slow on your old PC. You know exactly why that is, and it is your fault as much as mine. It's because of us, software engineers, that everything is slow, so it is completely hypocritical that on HN of all places one has to explain that sadly to run modern software one needs modern hardware. We've put ourselves in this situation and now there's a lot of surprised Pikachu faces around, complaining about Windows getting slower and alt-tabbing to their day job writing yet another crappy Javascript abstraction layer on their shiny M1 MBP.
  - asdff 5y ago
    Where do people even pick this sort of stuff up to take with them into industry? Are they teaching Electron development now in undergrad CSE programs instead of C?
    - tester756 5y ago
      Speaking of C languages C++ still does need more resources to compile programs than AAA games and keep running for 20min / 1h / 2h / 4h? What were they teaching those compilers engineers and language designers back in the day? nothing about writing performant code, performance tests, regressions and yada yada?
      - astrange 5y ago
thrower123 5y ago
I'm usually frustrated that I've got dozens of GB of unused RAM, and some horrible 32-bit app is thrashing and paging to disk because it's getting close to using 2 GB.
II2II 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. You pretty much answered your own question. Whether you like it or not, people are still using hard drives because hard drives are still being sold. Just because those people prioritize capacity over performance, for a given price point, doesn't mean they want performance to be ignored altogether.
Silhouette 5y ago
Run old technology with old software. That argument would be more convincing if Microsoft hadn't systematically pushed the owners of older PCs to update them to run Windows 10. How many millions of PCs dating from the early to mid 2010s are now stuck with the results despite their hardware still working normally?
- collaborative 5y ago
  I still can't believe they did that. Such disregard for the user
  - DocTomoe 5y ago
    The same users who tried to keep Windows XP forever. Microsoft got burned once after maintaining one version well beyond its due date, and decided to go to the other extreme.
    - Silhouette 5y ago
      In my experience, it wasn't that people wanted to keep XP forever, it was that Vista was worse. When 7 arrived, the number of XP holdouts fell quickly. The trouble with 7 in that situation is that either 8.1 or 10 needed to be the next good version, but they weren't. Do you know anyone who actually wants their system to change its UI every six months? Or to install updates whether they agree with them or not, even though those updates can have serious consequences if they go wrong and cause inconvenience even if they work? Or who likes having their own computer phoning home without their consent? Or having ads inserted into their daily user experience? If Microsoft was producing an operating system people actually wanted, they wouldn't need to push dodgy updates to get people to use it.
j1elo 5y ago
Your comment went for me from borderline troll, to holder of the truth on your reply at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27585139 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27585139 As a C & C++ dev that has always cared that my software works on machines and networks that are a fraction of what I use for testing, I get so tired of careless programs that have clearly been designed for the latest beefiest machines that the devs had at that time. Same for the web. It should be mandatory by Law to verify websites with the baseline of a 2G connection. (just... half kidding)
andrepd 5y ago
Being blunt: you're a terrible developer if you think like that. What the heck does it matter if 5400 RPM disks are old technology or not?? Do you have any actual reason that your program runs slowly on such hardware? It's very arrogant to assume that since you can afford to upgrade to the latest technologies, then everyone who can't should be left behind. There are probably billions of people using spinning rust in their machines. If your software does not run with acceptable performance then that's a problem with your software, not their hardware.
- cshokie 5y ago
  (Not the OP) The issue is that the speed -characteristics- are so very different between HDDs and SSDs. Not just the raw speed. Decent performance of anything with IO on an HDD requires that the IO is specifically structured to minimize seeks and maximize sequential access. That takes time and skill. If very few modern machines don’t have an SSD then it is understandable to simply skip this difficulty. That time and effort is often better spent elsewhere, and this is a valid tradeoff to make.
  - badsectoracula 5y ago
    Random access on SSDs is still slower than sequential access though, even if not as slow as on HDDs - there is more than seeking that comes into play.
marderfarker2 5y ago
More often than not I find modern software regress in terms of feature compared to “older” software. An obvious example is softwares that has win32 and their UWP counterpart. The UWP version usually is stripped down in features, buggy and more resource hungry, e.g. Windows 7 Photo Viewer vs the Win 10 Photos app. One would associate modern to something that is improved, better, faster. But that’s not the case with current state of software.
anthk 5y ago
>Do you expect Windows 10 to run on a Pentium II with 512MB RAM as well, because some version of Linux does? Void Linux, Debian, Slackware... just fine. Maybe with 720p video with a good Radeon 9800 video card for the AGP bus. But a Pentium III with SSE would run much better.

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.
  - jaywalk 5y ago
    So instead of helping her learn one of the many (free) web-based tax applications, you built her a new computer to run a new (paid) version of the tax software she was already using? How does that even make sense?
    - at-fates-hands 5y ago
      She tried several of the "Free" web based tax apps, and always had problems with them. And yeah, I built her a PC that could run a current version of the software she paid for. It makes sense when you want to help someone to use the software they already paid for, instead of pointing an elderly person to the web and saying, "See? They have FREE versions, go grab one and figure it on your own!" Sorry, but that to me is kind of a callous solution compared to what I did.
    - collaborative 5y ago
      At 80 many can't manage to learn anything new or different
- Marsymars 5y ago
  > 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. I'd highlight IOPS. A $300 SSD is about 3000× faster than an HDD.
- bscphil 5y ago
  > It's not space age technology, solid state storage has been consumer technology for 2 decades already. You're exaggerating. The first really plausible SSDs to appear in consumer PCs appeared in around 2006 or 2007, so maybe 15 years tops. For instance, Dell offered a computer with 32 GB of SSD storage in mid-2007. This was already not much storage at the time, and the drive alone cost over $500. This was arguably not a consumer affordable product at that price, and the laptops involved were actually the Latitude series (targeted to businesses) anyway. Apple followed this up in 2008 with a 64 GB SSD, but this was a $1000 upgrade. Suffice it to say that a vast majority of people were only buying (and could probably only afford to buy) computers with rotational drives well into the 2010s. Many of the computers they bought are still running today. Many affordable computers that shipped with Windows 10 still had rotational drives. It's absurd to overlook a whole class of people who can't, unlike the wealthy, upgrade their MacBooks every 2 or 3 years. They probably don't have MacBooks to begin with. Parents are passing old hardware between children like hand-me-downs. That's before you even leave the United States. I think your comment misses the point at a deeper level, which is that most people in this thread already have SSDs (I certainly do), but are disappointed that performance matters so little to many developers that they are fine with seeing software run at the same speed on today's insanely fast hardware that its predecessor did 20 years ago. Software is much more powerful than it was in the days of floppy disks, but it's not much more powerful than it was 15 years ago. We've seen a generational increase in performance, but we've wasted it. I think that's worth some disappointment.
Leherenn 5y ago
I've had massive issues with Ubuntu on a HDD. Every time a big file was added to disk (like a download), the indexing system would run and render the whole system unusable for minutes (100% disk and CPU). Upgrading to an SSD solved the issue.
- zokula 5y ago
  That's an Ubuntu problem and not an Linux problem thank goodness.
  - astrange 5y ago
    That depends how good Linux's support for very-low-priority background tasks is. UNIX priorities don't handle this situation well because a low priority process is still technically immediately runnable and can cause priority inversions by clearing out all kinds of system caches that your foreground app was using.
asdff 5y ago
On my 2012 mbp I have the OS and software running on the SSD in the drive bay, and a beefy hdd in the disk slot for storage. I set this up back when a 256gb SSD was pretty expensive, but maybe that sort of strategy would work for you now that SSD prices have gone up again, having a fast drive for software and the system and a big drive for storage.

jokoon 5y ago

I don't understand this argument, could you explain why modern software cannot run on old hardware? It sounds like it's justifying planned obsolescence.

1_player 5y ago
Can you explain why you expect modern software to run on old hardware first? Should I be surprised that my turn of the millennium PC can't even run Slack? Yes, in absolute terms it's a bit ridiculous, but we're not talking philosophy here, Moore's law is a thing and software has been getting more complex as hardware got faster. Deal with it. How is this news?
- bionade24 5y ago
  There are Slack clients out there, which use a hundreth of the official one and they can run on these old machines, too. The problem aren't more ressource itensive features not possible before, but delivering a services we have for decades with way worse ressource usage because you can.
  - djrogers 5y ago
    > There are Slack clients out there, which use a hundreth of the official one and they can run on these old machines, too Uhh, care to share? Asking for a friend....
    - Marsymars 5y ago
      Maybe referring to Ripcord. I haven't used for Slack though, I don't know what Slack's position is on third-party clients - using them with Discord is liable to get you banned.
    - bionade24 5y ago
      Ripcord is the most advanced, SailSlack for SailfishOS and lots of CLI clients.
- 5y ago

Zababa 5y ago

What exactly does "modern software" does that justifies needing the hardware to follow at such a pace?

beckingz 5y ago
It runs on more modern hardware. And has more adware!

Hammershaft 5y ago

> Why do people still expect modern software to run at incredible speeds on hard disk drives? Modern software usually doesn't run at incredible speeds on an nvme drive with top of the line hardware. Modern software is often just slow. What can I do on a modern operating system today that I couldn't do on a predecessor released 20 years ago? What justifies that Windows 10 feels slower to use then Windows XP while Windows 10 runs on hardware that is tens of thousands of times faster? Under this lens, what really defines modern software is slowness. Take away the advantage of orders of magnitude of hardware improvements and you would be left with something unusably slow.

MereInterest 5y ago
Exactly. I am of the opinion that anything that was possible in computing 15 years ago should be perceptibly instant today. There are obvious exceptions such as cross-continent communication being limited by the speed of light, but as a general rule. Instead, we get software that's written as if Dennard scaling were still occurring.
- HeckFeck 5y ago
  When I was a child, I had a reverent wonder for technology and all it might do in the future. Realisations like this replaced that with a dry cynicism. My inner child is disappointed.
  - tremon 5y ago
    When I was a child, I was thinking how amazing it would be if I could store all my games floppy disk on a single, network-accessible drive so that I could access them all without installing and swapping them all the time. Nowadays I have a NAS that stores both the raw media and installation scripts for those games, and I have wine/dosbox/mame/mess startup scripts for many of them. Can't say that my inner child is disappointed about that, but building and curating that system took a lot more effort than I'd like to admit. I don't buy games that require online activation, because I can't store and play them the same way. My inner child is very disappointed about that.

windows2020 5y ago

Modern <noun> is mostly worse than <noun>.

yjftsjthsd-h 5y ago

> Do you expect Windows 10 to run on a Pentium II with 512MB RAM as well, because some version of Linux does? ...Yes? What is it doing that wouldn't fit in those constraints?

1_player 5y ago
I do not absolutely get this obtuse question. It is not my place to justify why modern software is so inefficient, pointing the finger to Windows 10 in particular as if it's an outlier. Why are YOU using inefficient languages, heavyweight virtual machines, GB sized binaries, Electron and Javascript to write your applications? Why is your boss asking to add feature upon feature upon feature? There is a reason we're in this place, but until then, my point is, stop complaining everything is slow on your old PC. You know exactly why that is, and it is your fault as much as mine. It's because of us, software engineers, that everything is slow, so it is completely hypocritical that on HN of all places one has to explain that sadly to run modern software one needs modern hardware. We've put ourselves in this situation and now there's a lot of surprised Pikachu faces around, complaining about Windows getting slower and alt-tabbing to their day job writing yet another crappy Javascript abstraction layer on their shiny M1 MBP.
- asdff 5y ago
  Where do people even pick this sort of stuff up to take with them into industry? Are they teaching Electron development now in undergrad CSE programs instead of C?
  - tester756 5y ago
    Speaking of C languages C++ still does need more resources to compile programs than AAA games and keep running for 20min / 1h / 2h / 4h? What were they teaching those compilers engineers and language designers back in the day? nothing about writing performant code, performance tests, regressions and yada yada?
    - astrange 5y ago

thrower123 5y ago

I'm usually frustrated that I've got dozens of GB of unused RAM, and some horrible 32-bit app is thrashing and paging to disk because it's getting close to using 2 GB.

II2II 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. You pretty much answered your own question. Whether you like it or not, people are still using hard drives because hard drives are still being sold. Just because those people prioritize capacity over performance, for a given price point, doesn't mean they want performance to be ignored altogether.

Silhouette 5y ago

Run old technology with old software. That argument would be more convincing if Microsoft hadn't systematically pushed the owners of older PCs to update them to run Windows 10. How many millions of PCs dating from the early to mid 2010s are now stuck with the results despite their hardware still working normally?

collaborative 5y ago
I still can't believe they did that. Such disregard for the user
- DocTomoe 5y ago
  The same users who tried to keep Windows XP forever. Microsoft got burned once after maintaining one version well beyond its due date, and decided to go to the other extreme.
  - Silhouette 5y ago
    In my experience, it wasn't that people wanted to keep XP forever, it was that Vista was worse. When 7 arrived, the number of XP holdouts fell quickly. The trouble with 7 in that situation is that either 8.1 or 10 needed to be the next good version, but they weren't. Do you know anyone who actually wants their system to change its UI every six months? Or to install updates whether they agree with them or not, even though those updates can have serious consequences if they go wrong and cause inconvenience even if they work? Or who likes having their own computer phoning home without their consent? Or having ads inserted into their daily user experience? If Microsoft was producing an operating system people actually wanted, they wouldn't need to push dodgy updates to get people to use it.

j1elo 5y ago

Your comment went for me from borderline troll, to holder of the truth on your reply at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27585139 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27585139 As a C & C++ dev that has always cared that my software works on machines and networks that are a fraction of what I use for testing, I get so tired of careless programs that have clearly been designed for the latest beefiest machines that the devs had at that time. Same for the web. It should be mandatory by Law to verify websites with the baseline of a 2G connection. (just... half kidding)

andrepd 5y ago

Being blunt: you're a terrible developer if you think like that. What the heck does it matter if 5400 RPM disks are old technology or not?? Do you have any actual reason that your program runs slowly on such hardware? It's very arrogant to assume that since you can afford to upgrade to the latest technologies, then everyone who can't should be left behind. There are probably billions of people using spinning rust in their machines. If your software does not run with acceptable performance then that's a problem with your software, not their hardware.

cshokie 5y ago
(Not the OP) The issue is that the speed -characteristics- are so very different between HDDs and SSDs. Not just the raw speed. Decent performance of anything with IO on an HDD requires that the IO is specifically structured to minimize seeks and maximize sequential access. That takes time and skill. If very few modern machines don’t have an SSD then it is understandable to simply skip this difficulty. That time and effort is often better spent elsewhere, and this is a valid tradeoff to make.
- badsectoracula 5y ago
  Random access on SSDs is still slower than sequential access though, even if not as slow as on HDDs - there is more than seeking that comes into play.

marderfarker2 5y ago

More often than not I find modern software regress in terms of feature compared to “older” software. An obvious example is softwares that has win32 and their UWP counterpart. The UWP version usually is stripped down in features, buggy and more resource hungry, e.g. Windows 7 Photo Viewer vs the Win 10 Photos app. One would associate modern to something that is improved, better, faster. But that’s not the case with current state of software.

anthk 5y ago

>Do you expect Windows 10 to run on a Pentium II with 512MB RAM as well, because some version of Linux does? Void Linux, Debian, Slackware... just fine. Maybe with 720p video with a good Radeon 9800 video card for the AGP bus. But a Pentium III with SSE would run much better.