LOL! No, the HDD never was reasonably fast. Our expectations changed.
I booted up an old Windows XP box about two years ago before recycling it. It took almost TWO MINUTES to finish booting to the desktop. Some kind of fairly standard 500 GB Western Digital Blue drive. No, I don't know if it had ever been defragmented or had its TEMP files cleared or had old driver modules removed... It was just slow.
I just don't buy it. Sure, SSDs have always been faster—I remember how exciting they were when they were new—but HDDs were always "fine". Not fast, maybe, but nothing ever felt broken. I never waited multiple seconds to open a search box, for example.
And more broadly... have you ever tried running Windows XP in a VM, on modern hardware? Even virtualized, if you feed it anything approaching the resources of a typical 2021 machine, it absolutely flies compared to Windows 10.
I have an SSD for a boot drive on my personal and work computers. Both go out for lunch for long periods of time.
It might be me.
I know my reaction time is 35% faster than my teenage son. I am much more bothered by latency than other people, I'm starting to think that I experience more time than other people.
I can't stand playing single-player games on a Samsung TV that isn't in game mode. The sloppy response drains out all my fun.
When I was playing League of Legends on a "gaming" laptop I found I couldn't ever win (not feel like I was floundering, attacks hitting me and i couldn't do anything about, people avoiding my attacks 100% of the time) until I attached an external monitor. I took movies and could show the timer was 30 ms late on the internal monitor compared to the internal monitor.
Most people seem indifferent to this sort of thing, but not me.
> Most people seem indifferent to this sort of thing, but not me.
The average person who walks into a museum will be able to tell you which paintings they like, and which they do not. An art historian, however, will be able to tell you why they like certain paintings, and discuss specific details in the composition.
You are like the art historian. When you play a game on a laggy TV, you can tell that the TV's latency is making the game worse. A layperson just finds the game less engaging, and doesn't know that it could be better, much less why.
Arguably, the issue is when the HDD isn't the only computer you use. If you switch to using an SSD on, say, a laptop, boot times are super fast, you get used to that, etc.
Then you go use an HDD, and suddenly everything feels slow. The thing is, it's not actually slower than it was before, it's just slower than your most recent comparison point.
If only use an HDD, though, those boot time are just the way it is. I never actually found it to be a large difference between Windows and Linux. The difference that really bit me was startup apps on Windows, but fresh installs were plenty quick.
I think in a lot of ways it's like getting off a freeway after a while. On a regular in-city drive, the road speeds feel normal and reasonably quick (assuming no traffic). When you've just gotten off the freeway, though, you're at half the speed of what you've been driving at for the last hour or two, and it feels very slow.
HDD have been slow since before Windows 10 was announced. I was converting friends to SSDs during the Windows 7 era. At least on HN I would expect technical-minded people to have some perspective on the speed of storage mediums and how _fast_ and _cheap_ solid state drives are. Yes, I said cheap.
A crappy SSD from a good brand is £70/TB (Samsung 860 QVO), and it is ORDERS (plural) of magnitude faster an a hard disk drive.
You can run whatever you want on antiquated hardware, but please people, stop complaining about it and get on with the times already.
