Thread 106501840

Why do modern operating systems require a SSD to function? How did Windows 95, XP, 7 & 8 run butter smooth even on 5400rpm spinning hard disks? I want to use a spinning disk as my boot drive, but can't anymore due to OSes feeling sluggish on it.

>>106501840 (OP)
>How did Windows 95, XP, 7 & 8 run butter smooth even on 5400rpm spinning hard disks
They didn't
and they all run better on SSDs

>>106501840 (OP)
Install linux

Windows 9* would blue screen if you inserted a scratched compact disc. Take them nostalgia glasses off grandpa.

I noticed around 2015-16, but most of win10's rape of the disks is the spying and bloatware from consumer versions. Hell loading all the ads in the start menu hits it. Add on a scan-happy 3rd part anti-virus and search indexing. It gets bad. I've seen low spec win10 laptops with hdd which were usable on win7, but when auto updated they would take 5 minutes+ to reach a usable desktop from boot.
Embedded, ltsc, debloat, turn off search because it doesn't work well anyway. Web browsers and electron programs also need their configuration edited to stop dumping their state to disk every 30 seconds. Once every hour is fine for me. Then you can have decent win10 hdd experience and it helps with ssd as well.

>install Debian 13 with desktop environment/office suite
>under 5 GB
>install Windows 11
>64 GB storage used just from a fresh install

Why does it need so much storage?

>>106501840 (OP)
>7 & 8 run butter smooth even on 5400rpm spinning hard disks?
They don't.
Bootup time will always be close to a minute

>>106501892
Computers were just slow then, yes. It was in the 2010s that there was a noticeable increase in disk usage for what was basically the same hardware and is. Your average consumer didn't understand it and instead of getting ram + ssd and/or tweaking software they mostly bought a new "windows 10 computer" which at the time was likely to have an hdd anyway.

>>106501914
Yeah but 10/11 are much worse on same hardware. That's what op is talking about. It was a real problem.
>>106501911
For candy crush, and because on windows swap is a file and not a partition.

>>106501840 (OP)
The best explanation I've heard so far is that modern computers are the equivalent of having multiple old computers in a single box. So a modern day 9800X3D/RTX 4090 PC with 32GB of RAM can do the work of like 10 PCs from 2010. You can torrent while you play vidya while you listen to music while you export video while you host a website while you ....

Thus the need for faster volatile and non-volatile storage. r0rt

>>106501840 (OP)
You just can't run a modern OS on a hard disk. Either you run Win 7 or an old Linux on a hard disk, either you buy a cheap SSD and run a modern OS. 7 is still very fine, especially with VxKex to fix incompatibilities.

>>106501852
Yes they did and they still do, I still have old computers around running XP and 7. Win 10 and 11 are totally unusable on a hard disk however.
But it's not just Windows, Linux Mint takes ages to boot on a hard disk... At least Mint is usable once started though, while modern Windows is just totally unusable on a hard disk, not only it takes ages to boot but it takes twenty seconds before reacting to any click...

>>106501852
When the leap to SSDs first happened it turned 1-10 minute start up time into 10 seconds or less. Now we're back to 1+ minute start ups on Winblows.

Nothing ran smooth on a hard drive. Hard drives have been outdated for OS and programs since 2011

I'm not believing anyone that said Windows 8 ran butter smooth on a hard disk. I was there and it did not. The day I put an SSD into it was a night and day difference.

>>106501911
Is Debian worth it over Ubuntu for typical desktop usage? Not too much suffering with everything in the repo never having major updates? So far I've only used it on servers where it doesn't matter since it's mostly just being a container host.

>>106501852
Yes they did, zoomer

>>106501995
No. I have a windows 7 bmw diagnostic laptop. When I forget to turn off the wifi it freezes completely because of the spinning drive.

Fucking zoomers have no memory or experience of older os, on windows 98 days a pc took from 1 to 5 minutes to boot, ide hard drives speed were from 5 to 40mbps

>>106501840 (OP)
Windows xp and 7 were both slow as shit on HDDs.
Zoomer op didn't live through those times

>>106502069
No they weren't / your PC was garbage

>>106502083
Ok zoomie you don't get points here on /g/ for being a contrarian edgelord

>>106502034
Yes definitely. Since 12, the non-free-firmware suite means things like wi-fi should work from the installer. You don't need major updates. Firefox ESR is better than the AI chatbox Firefox we have now. Just install Flatpak or install .debs as a local user if you need something new. Just don't make a Frankendebian. Keep it simple and it will be reliable/upgradable to the next version without ever needing to reinstall.

>>106502035
No they didn't.
Be quiet.

>>106502083
Windows 11 boots super fast, it's your OC that is garbage

>>106501914
>They don't.
>Bootup time will always be close to a minute
Why lie, especially to your /g/ brethren?

There are a lot of things going on, but part of it has to do with breaking up a lot of modules in the operating system.
If you look at the number of default processes running on each operating system, they've always increased over time and while there are a lot of new system processes, there are also a lot of broken up services.
You can minimize the bottleneck that is the HDD by optimizing the reads/writes, moving to SSD you can go the other way and let the smaller processes use the SSD when they want.

>>106502021
>The day I put an SSD into it was a night and day difference.
Of course you'll notice a difference, but I'm talking about when used/seen in isolation.
The hard disks just did fine to run 8 and chugged along smoothly.

>>106502093
>>106502127
I really don't care what your opinion is on this matter because you're both wrong and no amount of cope will change that. Windows 7 and XP had much lower requirements than subsequent systems, lower disk usage on a clean installation and significantly lower network usage. This is all well documented.

>>106502166
>switches to a completely different argument

>>106502141
>but part of it has to do with breaking up a lot of modules in the operating system.
>If you look at the number of default processes running on each operating system, they've always increased over time and while there are a lot of new system processes, there are also a lot of broken up services.
But anon, who even asked asked for all of this in the first place? I'm sure users didn't. Why is being rammed down our throats?*lifts hands up in frustration*

>>106502166
Yeah but hard drives were way slower than modern drives so they still sucked on those OS, you get 160mbps while around 2000 you were lucky if your drive hit 40mbps, you never experienced that

>>106502155
SSD salesmen are not allowed in this thread.

>>106502191
Bitch please I still have my samsung 830 drive from 2012, you probably weren't born yet

>>106502166
Correct & good post.

>>106502166
>>106502203
Samefagging doesn't work here on /g/ since you actually have hard data to compare against

>>106502000
Maybe on your PC, with some pending updates.

its not any better on a new ssd either. window's problem is something else.
t. i posted a video in the last thread that will go ignored lel

>>106502177
The OS developers did.
And we can more granularly disable services.

>>106502191
cool it with antisemitism

>>106502180
They were, that is true. I base my experience on a mid-range 2006 PC which was running Windows 7 (and XP earlier on) and was used for multimedia, Office, playing some older games and later browsing the web. I cannot say for sure how it would compare to modern PCs at the last task (because the web from back then no longer exists) but at all the other it is significantly faster than or nearly as fast as my i7 MacBook Pro from 2018 running the latest version of macOS. I'm talking about the general speed of human interaction and snappiness in equivalent software, not raw throughput measured by benchmarks.
>Yeah but hard drives were way slower than modern drives so they still sucked on those OS
It didn't matter because a) filesystem caching did a good job at mitigating long seek time and b) software was optimized for contemporary hardware and was NOT CPU-bound to the extent it is now. Office 2003 / 2007 felt much faster and more responsive there than M365 software does on R9 5950X and Samsung 980 Pro, for example.

>>106501840 (OP)
I remember getting a $300 dell server with 2 10k drives in raid and it was an amazing experience in 2010 compared to a single 7200rpm drive. Swapping a ssd in place of the 5400rpm drives that were in every laptop was an equivalent experience for everyone I did that for.

>>106501840 (OP)

how high refresh rate you have my display have 60Hz 5400rpm hdd at preload site doomscroll is not smooth enough

>>106501892
Win95 hanged and crashed even if you tried to write inside a non-formatted floppy disk. I have seen it myself.

>>106501840 (OP)
Before ssds people had tiny 15k boot drives, and when ssds came out they were even smaller, 8-16gb. It was laughable people were spending hundreds of dollars on this crap

>>106501840 (OP)
>>106501852
They did run smoothly you dumbass. It was because the OS didn't have 50+ services running at the same time and did't log data all the time.

>>106502623
my first ssd was a sandisk ultra II 480 in 2015

>>106501840 (OP)
Maybe it was fast compared to loading game from casette tape but...
Win95 worked as shit from 850MB WD Caviar HDD. I've had Promise caching controller with 4MB Ram and it solved the problem. SSD is always better you retarded gorilla nigger porch monkey.

>>106502638
No they didn't
You're retarded
Go back and use them if you want then

>>106502035
No they didn't i used to press the power button on my windows xp pc, then went to make some coffee, and it finally booted when i were back with my coffee. Also pc's used to freeze all the time no mater how expensive it was. Now it takes just a few seconds to boot even in a VM on modern hardware. It really sucked back in the day.

>>106503070
my god... you dont even realize that you've outed yourself.

>>106501995
Nothing is good on a HDD, not modern or old os.
That said, I do run my os partially on HDD. It increases boot times, but I only restart for updates so makes no difference.

>>106501840 (OP)
All current versions of Windows run just fine off HDDs, newfriend. They start up slower that way, however, but are entirely usable if you aren't mentally ill. Some Android tablets don't even start up as fast as Windows 10 or 7 running off HDDs, and tablets only come with SSD storage.

HDDs aren't worth it outside of being backup drives where you store data you don't want to lose.

>>106502002
skill issue, techlet
But then normies in general are all techlets, so the bitching was a massive cacophony.

>>106502327
skill issue, techlet

>>106503296
hey if you can point me to the setting that will eliminate that issue (while leaving animarions disabled, mind) im all ears

>How did Windows 95, XP, 7 & 8 run butter smooth even on 5400rpm spinning hard disks?
Those rose-colored glasses must have lenses a meter thick. I've been doing SMB consulting since Novell Netware was still king, and system storage optimization has always been a bastard. If you ever encountered a 'butter smooth' Windows system on HDD, there were many, many man-hours of careful tuning behind it. Today I can walk into fucking Walmart and buy an SSD that will provide performance that would have required dozens or hundreds of spindle-locked HDDs and carefully configured hardware controllers back in the 90s.

>>106503247
>and tablets only come with SSD storage.
?
Most come with emmc or nand flash, though

>>106501840 (OP)
>I want to use a spinning disk as my boot drive

why do you have such retarded needs?

>>106503438
I will pee in your ears if you come close to me.

>How did Windows 95, XP, 7 & 8 run butter smooth even on 5400rpm spinning hard disks?

I remember my old PentiumIII running Windows98 taking a good 3–4 minutes to fully boot into the OS before I could launch one of the early versions of Mozilla Firefox

>>106503510
why would you threaten me with good times?

>>106501876
Install Gentoo

>>106501840 (OP)
>>106503247
>Why do modern operating systems require a SSD to function?
>All current versions of Windows run just fine off HDDs, newfriend
Yes. Idk about modern Loonix but Windows 10 and 11 can run just fine on HDDs after some heavy debloating.
Of particular note, when running W10 or W11 from HDDs you should disable all telemetry, Windows Update services and the Sysmain service, they rape HDDs (actually they rape SSDs as well and heavily reduce their lifespan, you just don't notice it).

thread is literally full of zoomers claiming old slow hardware was faster than today's
lol butter smooth

> I want to use a spinning disk as my boot drive
then do it
> can't anymore
like you ever did zoomzoom

>>106502662
I bought a 120gb ultra 2 around the same time for around $90, it was a good deal at the time. i still have it somewhere

>>106502177
Things just work out of the box in most cases now . I'm not saying every decision is a good one, but plug n play compatibility for hardware leagues better than the late 90s.

Microsoft is intentionally increasing requirements as a bribe to hardware manufacturers to incentivize them to only support windblows

>>106501852
>They didn't
This. My first pc was win95 with 8mb simm memory. Just opening a folder would show the files one by one, like you were opening a webpage on a 28800 baud modem. This went a whole lot faster when I upgraded my pc to one with 32mb dimm memory

Thinly veiled cy-x.net xomputer article shill thread. Beware
https://cy-x.net/articles?id=11

>>106503900
why directly link what's shilled? to get people to click on your link? fuck off not clicking it

sorry I am retarded

>>106503900
Why warn about shilling and the you shill it dumbass? Post an archive link or gtfo

>>106503931

shit tier ecoboost was not his

>>106501840 (OP)
HDDS suck at random reads and writes. run crystaldiskmark sometime.

>>106503131
How so?

Some motherboards do have slow boot ups. My MSI is like that. Knew that from reviews before I bought. Beyond that it has been a solid board without any issues.

>>106504257
you're (sic) statement can be true only if one of the following is correct:
you were a child on the already old family computer
you are unironically brown or slavic but really those are the same
you were a normalfag with a pre built

>>106501840 (OP)
>Windows 95, XP, 7 & 8 run butter smooth even on 5400rpm spinning hard disks
Never happened

>>106504331
I did have a prebuilt but i don't know anyone who thinks that anything ever worked as intended at the time. Also i'm not slavic but that's a good guess as i do come from a post-soviet European country.

>How did Windows 95, XP, 7 & 8 run butter smooth
Ask me how I can tell you never used this.

>>106504331
>pre built
You are aware this was the vast majority of the population right?

>>106502453
Oh your little anecdotes are always so relevant and interesting, please share them every time.

>>106504395
i mean... didnt normalfag give that away?

>>106501840 (OP)
>Windows 95, XP, 7 & 8 ran butter smooth
LARPing zoomer, first of all you forgot vista. secondofly no they fucking didn't
> I want to use a spinning disk as my boot drive
Why? to be a contrarian hipster faggot? You can get as 1tb samsung nvme for $65 right now. Why would you want slow garbage boots and loads?
>old thing better because... because it just is ok!
laughs in 5,000 MB/s read/write

>>106504425
Fuck off dumb zoomer, at the time building your own pc wasn't as much of an option as it is right now.

>>106504425
No shit
But to include like 90% of the population as a disquafier for why an experience isn't valid is something else

>>106504480
i member computer geeks dot com sold diy parts.
>>106504488
*flips collar* something else is what we need right now

>>106503622
It's just a thinly veild poorfag thread.
Shit moves on, hardware swaps roles, new hardware comes out but it's all terrible.

I remember the anon who sat in threads complaining that no ssd is good and why bother when his system was some slim pre-built that still managed to have two pci slots.

>>106501840 (OP)
In some offices, boots were so slow they would be scheduled before the employees came in.

>>106504467
>laughs in 5,000 MB/s read/write
*actually 1000MB/s after you fill it halfway through
*actually dogshit 4K random read compared to ancient Optane

>>106504793
>*actually 1000MB/s after you fill it halfway through
???????????
Limited by my PCI 3.0 chipset too.
>*actually dogshit 4K random read compared to ancient Optane
Dang optane has nvme beat there. How does optane fare when you want to store more than 118 gb of data?

>>106504480
idk where you're getting that idea, I was building PCs from secondhand parts in 2000 when I was a kid, if anything that era was when it was the simplest of all, earlier you had more to worry about in software and today you have more sizes and standards for different parts which can get confusing, back then everything was enormous and it was obvious what it was and where it went

the thing about pressing power then having time to go make coffee is generally true, however

>>106501840 (OP)
They didn't run butter smooth, you fucking asshole! Fuck You!

>>106505008
Optane is nvme but is not NAND. Optane is bit-addressable so there’s no write amplification. Optane is not multi-level like nand so there is no performance degradation as the drive fills and there no “defragmenting” of partially erased pages like nand.

This means that a near full Optane device will be as fast as a brand new device and its endurance is multiple orders of magnitude higher. Optane devices are still the best SSD’s in existence.

>>106505008
>How does optane fare when you want to store more than 118 gb of data?
They made 1TB and 1.5TB drives with the 905P

>>106501852
>They didn't
they did, as especially on Win98, and maybe XP. When I've upgraded from XP to 7 from singlecore + old ass drive to dualcore and 1tb wd green 5400rpm... it was horrible, laggy mess. In a few years I gave up on this torture on bough SSD, it was godsend.

>>106501840 (OP)
>Why do modern operating systems require a SSD to function?
They don't. Linux still works just fine on a HDD and so does Windows 11

>>106501840 (OP)
>>106501876
>>106503554
Install PuppyOS if you've only got old HHD's to work with otherwise just pucker up $30 something dollars for a 128gb SATA SSD to boot off of and use the other one for storing the larger files like games an what not.

>>106501840 (OP)
>How did Windows 95, XP, 7 & 8 run butter smooth even on 5400rpm spinning hard disks?
If you ever used them you'd realise how laughable this statement is.
>>106502035
They didn't. The amount of data being moved around on a modern SSD for typical tasks would lock up an old hard drive. Backing up my 500mb windows 95 pc took like six hours

>>106501840 (OP)
>I want to use a spinning disk as my boot drive, but can't anymore due to OSes feeling sluggish on it.
Use linux with a ramdisk.

>How did Windows 95, XP, 7 & 8 run butter smooth even on 5400rpm spinning hard disks?
They didn't
You're just too young to remember. My NT4 system took like a minute to boot and I preferred to never turn it off

>>106504539
>It's just a thinly veild poorfag thread.
Oh, Mr. rich guy over here! So, anon, you were telling us to measure your and other's worth by the amount to money they spent on consumer electronics? Do tell/spill more of your pristine financial wisdom with us, please.

>>106501972
thats very true, i'd post morgan freeman saying true but i cant find the picture

>open file explorer
>hear hard drive spin up
>chkchkchk
>file explorer opens 8 seconds later
Some of my old computers would take like 10 minutes to boot on a good day

>>106501840 (OP)
Old computers were slow as fuck and it was 99% the fault of the old hard drives. Slap an SSD in there and they perk up real nicely.

All the monkeys jumping about in the thread saying that the old PCs and windows, etc. weren't quick and slow are retarded, as they're making their modern ssds as point of reference. Donkeys.

>>106501852
i boot up my old hyperthreaded single core lg notebook from time to time and its crazy snappy on windows xp on spinning rust

>>106501840 (OP)
>Why do modern operating systems require a SSD to function?
Lots of IO heavy background services. Old systems simply omitted them because they would have otherwise made the OS too painful to use.

>>106501840 (OP)
>How did Windows 95, XP, 7 & 8 run butter smooth even on 5400rpm spinning hard disks?
they didn't

>>106502000
My windows 10 PC starts up so fast it creeps me out.

>>106501840 (OP)
>run butter smooth
bro there's no fucking way
it was extremely common in the 90s to grab a cup of coffee and perform the entirety of your morning routine while you waited for that shit to boot and heaven forbid if you had to open photoshop or something heavy after

>>106501892
while true, a win9x bsod isn't the same as an NT bsod. an NT bsod is always fatal, and denotes a kernel crash. a 9x bsod on the other hand was used for basically any kind of system error, fatal or not. most of them could be dismissed with a key press

>>106503538
one time i shit up the family 98se computer so badly it took a literal 10 minutes to boot. it would be quite the achievement to shit up a modern pc with an ssd sufficiently enough to make it take 10 minutes to boot

modern os's do more than older ones, they also don't tend to be designed for running from a hdd anymore. there are things they used to do or used to not do because everyone used hdd's which is no longer the case anymore.

on linux for example you can do hdd booting quite quick with things like short-stroking, e4rat, preload, and prelink. all things that are basically irrelevant on an ssd due to their uniform extremely low seek latency, so nothing is set up for them anymore.

>>106509513
ps. even with all those tricks, it's still not as fast as a modern ssd. the difference in latency and random-I/O is just too great

OP is a retard.

t. using microsoft OS' since ms-dos

>>106501840 (OP)
Old OSes worked smoothly only if you brute forced it by having the OS loaded into RAM. If swapping happened, it was a waitfest.
Each old os had a RAM breakpoint where it would suddenly work smoothly. For W95 it was about 48MB. Games had similar problems, Diablo 2 stopped abusing the hdd at 192MB of ram, despite having 32 as requirement.

>>106509674
i remember getting battlefield 2 when i had 512MB of ram. it ran fine... eventually. like it would stutter horribly for about the first 10 min of gameplay, then after then it was perfectly fine. swapping was something you wanted to avoid as much as you could on a hdd, which was often difficult back when most people didn't really have a surplus of ram

>>106505312
Protip: old optane drives make great swap/scratch/log devices for file servers.

>>106501892
Don’t think that ever happened to me, just wouldn’t read it

>>106501840 (OP)
>How did Windows 95, XP, 7 & 8 run butter smooth even on 5400rpm spinning hard disks?
They didn't, go boot one and time it, even better try to do a large disk transfer on it.

>>106502623
>15k boot drives
I almost miss my Cheetas

>>106502453
i remember back in the day if u had the velociraptor drive you were the bee's knee's. i guess nowadays you wouldn't need to buy a dedicated boot drive and instead get budget hbm 4tb nvme and call it a day.
strangely enough, what reminds me most of pc's of before is the mbp. it even makes a silly noise when u turn it on

People who remember everything being fast did not use computers. I built a Pentium 2 PC out of old commercial parts when I was 11. Shit a manually spinning, manually reading and writing stack of discs can never be THAT fast, thats why the meta is having a fuckton of them.

>>106502662
>>106502623
i got a an ocz vertex 4 64GB in 2012. more than enough for my linux install and all my programs. i still own it and it still works. it's currently in a 2.5" sata to usb enclosure acting as my ventoy drive

>>106501897
I had a win10 laptop with HDD (I'm still using it but now with an ssd), it took 2-3 minutes to boot, and everything took forever to load

>>106510331
I do remember that windows menus didn't need loading placeholders, though.

>>106501852
they did zoomer
if you use SSD for them they would not just run, but fly

>>106505917
>run your games on HDD latency bro
no one does that anymore boomer. Also doubt OP is a gamer

Make 8tb SSDs ane 24tb HDDs cheap.

>>106501995
>or an old Linux on a hard disk
you can only do that if you pick a distro without (((systemd)))

>>106501953
you can put swap in a file on linux, too.
it's not recommended, but you can.

>>106514972
depends on the filesystem and the kernel

>>106514972
I did that back in the day, for reasons I forget

I think it's in a file as standard now