I'm kind of surprised Windows 11 allows you to install to or run from something that isn't an SSD. Windows 7 ran just fine on spinners, but Windows 10 is pretty bad; I'm not surprised Windows 11 is worse, but they really should just disallow it.
I mean, that would be great; but if nobody is holding the line on resource-creep, as is obviously the case, and nobody is testing if releases are acceptable on HDDs, as is obviously the case, they should just change the published requirements to reflect reality.
Shouldn't be a hard sell for OEMs; official specs are 64 GB is enough storage for windows 11, and I can get a 128 GB SSD for $15 retail, whereas the lowest price hard drive I can find is $25 retail (500 GB, but 3.5"), so if you're a cheap PC OEM, putting in a crappy, tiny, SSD saves money. And the only systems without SSDs I saw on BestBuy were refurbished machines shipping with Windows 10.
Why shouldn't they? People don't buy operating systems to be slimmed down...
If you got a computer and it didn't come with all the needed drivers and a web browser along with most of the functionality needed to print, you'd most likely wonder what decade it came from. All that stuff I listed, without the telemetry is still going to run like dog shit on a HDD.
I honestly think users are forgetting just how badly fragmented hard drives of days yonder used to run, and those same spinning disks are not any faster these days. Cutting down the OS to barely do anything still took more time than the complete boot cycle of my current computer up to a browser on an SSD.
Yeah, hard drives are never going to be great (although 15k rpm drives aren't too bad), but IMHO, the real thing that causes perf to be awful is that windows 10 (and I assume 11 has gotten worse) can't seem to ever stop writing to the disk. Those writes seem to interrupt reads enough that you never can get good sustained read speeds, so loading anything is painful.
I'm not going to setup a system to test, because it's too painful, but I'm now idly wondering if you could set the checkbox on a hard drive for "Turn off Windows write-cache buffer flushing on the device", and if that would help. Doing a aggregated write of a couple MB once a minute would probably work better than doing a few KB every second. Of course, at great risk of data loss, but YOLO. (a smidge of research seems to indicate this is for asking the device to pretty-please flush its internal write cache, so that might help a bit, but probably not very much; maybe there's a knob somewhere to tune the system file cache)
