• Please review our updated Terms and Rules here

Anybody still using spinning hard disks on their newer machines?

U

Unknown_K

Veteran Member
Joined
Sep 11, 2003
Messages
9,377
Location
Ohio/USA
When I started using Windows 10, I found even 7K RPM 1-4TB HDs that would be speedy enough in Windows 7 and earlier were kind of slow. So, I started buying smaller NVME drives for the machines that would boot from them to speed 90% of the workload and keep the spinning rust for file storage and for my older games (not really into anything newish). I find if the OS isn't hitting your game HD it tends to be speedy enough for older games that are only a few GB in size.

Anybody else still using HDs on their main systems for anything?
 
My big W11 gamer has a Samsung 990 Pro 4TB M.2 for the system and active apps plus a Seagate 3.5" 6TB spinner for library and storage. No noticeable lag on I/O for either unit. I also have pair of Western Digital 600GB 10K RPM Velociraptors in my W7 gamer that have seen duty for over 15 years or so.
 
Have had almost all NVMe since 2016, but I do have an HDD RAID1 in my gaming desktop for backup storage, no games or other used software on it though, just there in case it's needed.

Gaming desktop (Windows 11): 6TB of NVMe, 5TB of that being PCIe 4.0, 10TB RAID1 HDD
Gaming laptop (Windows 11): 3TB of NVMe (2TB of that a Linux drive)
Mac desktop: 1TB internal NVMe, 1TB external NVMe and 2TB external USB-C SSD (both externals holding AI data)
MacBook: 512GB NVMe
Router: 2x512GB NVMe ZFS (just because I had them left over after upgrades)

I skipped the SATA SSD phase for the most part aside from a 120GB Windows boot drive I had in 2015. I do have SATA SSDs for my PowerMac G4 and Raspberry Pi.

Not really a fan of hard disks. Most of my retro machines have solid state disks of some sort or another. Retro ROMs are served off a 1TB SSD attached to a Raspberry Pi.

The 10GB mirror is useful to have though. Plenty of space right there to throw stuff of to when needed for re-arranging drives or whatever.
 
I have mechanical hard drives for backup and large data archiving. I just trust mechanical drives to be able to sit around unused longer without data loss.
 
I have yet to use SSDs for anything but then my newest machine is ten years old. A couple years ago I bought a cheap lot of 3x 1.5GB drives. Used one to upgrade from a 500GB, used a second one for backups, and the third is still sitting unused.
 
Desktop in the lab has spinning disks.
Fileserver is all spinning disks.
Newest desktop has 256G SSD (don't ask me what type, m.2 SATA?) and a 14TB spinning disk for backup of the fileserver and steam library.
Router (an old Dell) has a spinning disk.
The one laptop I have with windows 10, which is a giveaway from the trash pile at work, came with a SATA SSD.
I guess my 486 Compaq runs CF cards!
 
All of my machines have SSD boot drives and (most have) spinning second drives. Anywhere from the Media server with 16T to, well, the rest of the machines which all have the old 1T's that were in them when I swapped in the SSD's.

I've been moving from SATA to NVMe slowly.

The amazing thing is you can rescue old Laptops because they are so slow with the old spinning disks that when you put SSD's in them they are literally 10 times faster. So as a result of this I have a lot of old laptops. I sat down in front of a friend's Dell laptop a few weeks ago that still had a spinning disk, and it was so slow that I offered to swap in an SSD for free.

For backups I have a shelf full of old spinnig disks that I plug in just long enough to do the backup, then unplug and put on the shelf.
 
Al Kossow said:
Did anyone ever come up with a solution for WinXP chewing through SSDs beyond upgrading to 7 ?
Click to expand...
I have an XP machine that currently running a 120GB Kinston SSD and have never had any issues. My W7 gamer has a Samsung 980 2TB M.2 but has never been through the upgrade path. Could you elaborate on that issue?
Al Kossow said:
Did anyone ever come up with a solution for WinXP chewing through SSDs beyond upgrading to 7 ?
Click to expand...
 
Have 4TB WD Black in my Win11 gaming rig mostly out of habit. Use it for older large games what do not benefit much from being on an SSD like Civilizations and AoE.
There are a couple of m.2 SSDs in it of course too.
 
Al Kossow said:
Did anyone ever come up with a solution for WinXP chewing through SSDs beyond upgrading to 7 ?
Click to expand...
I've been using an SSD in my ThinkPad X60 running Windows XP since 2012 with no problems. Manufacturers like Samsung and Intel provided their own "Performance Optimization" software that could be run automatically or manually to provide the same function as TRIM.
 
Al Kossow said:
Did anyone ever come up with a solution for WinXP chewing through SSDs beyond upgrading to 7 ?
Click to expand...

The only two things I think could cause excessive wear on an SSD on Windows XP is the page file being heavily used if the system doesn't have enough RAM. Or that the automatic defragger is turned on and is burning through write cycles.

Swap hell on low memory systems could easily significantly reduce the life of a SSD.
 
I was using a spinning hard drive on my Windows 10 system - until I was forced to use Microsoft Teams (barf!) and it literally took five minutes to start up, during which I could not do anything else. Stuffed in an SSD and at least it is vaguely usable now.
 
The reason that hard drives started to slow down with Vista and got progressively more untenable, to the point of being painful to use in Windows 10/11 is mostly because of volume shadow copy and the iterative patch method Microsoft uses with system files.

This creates tens of thousands of tiny sub 20 KB files in a hidden system directory, which the OS accesses basically all the time. This completely obliterates I/O performance on a regular hard drive since those tiny files are often spread all over the disk. If you disable or shrink the size of the VSC to basically nothing, you can force Windows to purge the lions share of those tiny files, and you'll get a sizeable performance boost. The downside is you lose the iterative backups of files, or backups altogether, as well as system snapshots.

Hard drives are really slow at reading tons of tiny files, and defragging programs can't really help because there's no uniform access pattern that you could arrange them in. Plus they change all the time.

So the next time you go to defrag a Windows Vista through 11 machine with a hard drive and it takes hours or days, you can thank all of these tiny files.
 
Thats why I use NVME (even if only 128/256GB) for the OS drive and a spinning disk for archives and games/apps. I just purchased a small batch of 1TB 7.2K Enterprise SATA drive with 256MB cache for data drives and they should hit 190MBs.

Years ago, I purchased a 512GB SATA SSD drive for my main machine and it speed up Windows 7 OS loading quite a bit (they can do 500Mbs) but once the drive fills up (there is no RAM cache) they slow down quite a bit so dumping downloads to a HD keeps that in check. I have a few X99 and LGA 1151 systems that have NVME and doing 2000MBs+ is pretty fast with Windows 10 boots in seconds. Even my X79 LGA 1150 boards that have SATA NVME boot very fast.

With everybody using SSD drives on older laptops you can get 500GB drives for a few bucks each and they still work great on Win 7 and older. I keep stacks of SATA and IDE drives for my laptops in stock.
 
I use an SSD for programs but have a 1TB mechanical drive for games, photos and documents plus a 4TB mechanical drive for back up of my NAS. I updated my newer laptops to SSD as anything newer than Windows 7 runs like crap on a mechanical drive.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top