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Wow spinner drives are slow!

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BugFreak

Joined
Apr 29, 2010
Location
Central FL
I've been running an SSD in all my primary computers for a while now so I'm kind of used to the speed. Currently doing a little work on an older laptop and upgrading it to Win 10 though and can't believe how slow this is going. I know this shows how spoiled I am but WOW everything takes forever to install/update! For anyone that might be second guessing the benefit of an SSD for any computer please know the SSD is the single greatest performance upgrade for a computer. /end rant :bang head

EDIT: Thought of a question to go along with my rant. Has anyone actually seen a hardware age point where the SSD didn't actually improve it? Like maybe the CPU or memory couldn't handle the speed enough to matter?
 
Older operating systems weren't as bad because they were built with a lot less things to load, winxp uses less than 100mb of ram to boot, win10 has like 2GB most of the time to load when it starts up which is over 20x more data to load just the desktop, and there are much more things going on in win10 with every command you run vs older os's
 
I'd still say going back to XP the difference was night and day with an SSD. The discussions of 'going to get a cup of coffee' while the computer booted went away once we switched even old Core Duo machines to an SSD. The hardest only important part (without using an add-in card) was to have a machine that had SATA and boom instant speed boost.
 
But look, it's not even 2gb. Mine shows 1.1gb! Look!
Background processes loaded 22
Windows processes loaded 75

Screenshot_20200529-135643_Gallery.jpg
 
I have put SSD's on older computers like with first gen SATA and it was an improvement over the spinner but not nearly as much as on newer rigs with SATA 3 and stronger CPUs. Don't forget, boot times are also influenced by processing power. Motherboard/bios differences can also affect boot times, even when all else is the same.
 
So I got tired of playing with the spinner and picked up a Samsung 860 Evo for the laptop. What a big difference on an older machine! Its an old Core i3 350M @ 2ghz with 4g of ram so just about 10 years old. I can definitely tell it is not taking full advantage of the SSD but it sure did make the Win 10 install and update much faster. I only need this thing for some remote working while on vacation which it should do nicely now. Before there was no way I could have used it without losing my mind.

This laptop has an older battery that doesn't hold charge too well so I'm interested to see how the SSD impacts that too.
 
The reason mechanical drives are so slow is because they are not always spinning, it takes a long time to get them up to speed, if they are already spinning, then the wait is not that long.
 
The reason mechanical drives are so slow is because they are not always spinning, it takes a long time to get them up to speed, if they are already spinning, then the wait is not that long.

Actually, unless the computer is in sleep or hibernation mode that is not true.

What makes mechanical drives so slow is the mechanical component in the seek time. Even when the platters are spinning, the read/write head has to find the spot on the platter where the desired data is stored or will be place. It actually has to physically travel above the platter surface until it locates that spot. In large file sequential reads and writes where there needs to be very little movement of the read/write head (because it's already in the right place), the performance of a platter hard drive and an SSD are not that much different.
 
Actually, unless the computer is in sleep or hibernation mode that is not true.
I believe windows powers down HDD after several mins by default (balanced plan). Maybe its 10 mins of idle? You can verify in the power plan. But I know mine (I have two for cold storage) need to spin up when accessing explorer.

That said, they are still slow compared to an SSD regardless if they are at the ready.


EDIT: I just sat down at the PC.....

Both High Performance and Balanced set the HDD to turn off after 20 mins.

sleep.jpg
 
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Thanks for the correction. Good to know. Haven't used a spinner in a while and I used to turn that stuff off in the power plan. But still, I think the main reason they are slow is the seek time head travel which applies even when they are spinning.
 
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