from the we-have-your-best-interests-at-heart dept.
Microsoft could finally kill HDD boot drives for good:
Microsoft could have plans to scrap its use of hard disk drives (HDD) among its main storage components on PCs running Windows 11, according to a recent report by industry analyst firm Trendfocus, as reported by Tom's Hardware.
If Microsoft goes through with its plans, consumers could begin to see solid-state hard drives (SSD) instead, with the exception of dual-drive desktop PCs and gaming laptops, which require multiple types of storage, as Tom's Hardware noted.
While Microsoft has declined to comment on the matter, the current trends indicate a complete market transition to SSD by 2023. Many PC makers already use SSD as their main storage option; however, it is still not a set standard, especially in emerging markets.
[...] Trendfocus Vice President John Chen told Tom's Hardware that 2023 is still not a hard date for the transition to SSD. Some suggestions considered in talks with Microsoft include holding off the transition of emerging markets until 2024 or pausing the desktop switch until that time.
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 09 2022, @10:51PM (4 children)
If they do this, how will they stop Linux from booting? Doesn't sound plausible, to me.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by stormreaver on Thursday June 09 2022, @10:58PM
They probably can't, but that not even the major takeaway here. That Microsoft has enough market power to dictate that OEM's shall not use HDD's for boot drives should, all by itself, cause governments around the world to dust off their antitrust departments. That would be almost the very definition of monopoly abuse.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Snotnose on Thursday June 09 2022, @11:03PM (1 child)
Simple. Unless you pay bookoo bux for a large SSD you won't have enough room to install Linux.
I just passed a drug test. My dealer has some explaining to do.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by stretch611 on Friday June 10 2022, @09:49AM
Interesting, but I personally think that it is more likely that the newest level of bloat cripples a hdd. Without a SSD windows may take 2 hours to boot.
Now with 5 covid vaccine shots/boosters altering my DNA :P
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Friday June 10 2022, @02:19PM
Microsoft has already embraced Linux. You can now install Windows Subsystem for Linux with a few rodent clicks. It will install a real honest to Microsoft distribution of Linux. One of several including Ubuntu, SuSE, Debian, Kali, and a couple others.
I very recently had to install this at work for some project -- even thought I have Linux running on several VMs on another server eight feet away.
I'm sure Microsoft will extend Linux to make it more attractive than real Linux.
"Oh, the program won't deploy on Linux on production! Something subtle must be different! What are we going to do!" cried the developer!
"Can we just switch to running Windows on the production servers?" said the mangler?
How often should I have my memory checked? I used to know but...
(Score: -1, Spam) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 09 2022, @11:04PM
fuck you forever
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 09 2022, @11:08PM (1 child)
Haven't you learned this already?
They have the power and influence as a Mafia more than any other.
They have people who either work with M$ or used to, in all sorts of positions across the world.
They lust over the scent of Linux and open source. Wherever you see Linux and/or open source seriously being discussed or something groundbreaking happening, they are there.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday June 10 2022, @03:04AM
> They have people who either work with M$ or used to, in all sorts of positions across the world.
OT, but we were amazed to learn that an early MS employee had a second career building software tools for Ferrari Formula 1. They really are everywhere...
(Score: 5, Insightful) by SomeGuy on Thursday June 09 2022, @11:53PM (5 children)
This is just retarded. Microsoft shouldn't have any say in the matter. It is not their decision.
If I want to boot Windows 13 from a hard drive, why the fuck should I magically not be allowed to do that?
I guess this is why everyone has to have a terabyte of RAM these days, because you can't use SSDs for swap.
Ok, spinning drives in a laptop has been a great idea since never, but what about real computers used for actual work with piles of storage and constantly changing contents?
Oh, right, fuck me, I'm supposed to put all of my shit in "the cloud" where Microsoft and pals can rape it, and nobody does real work any more, everything has to be a cell phone or tablet, and all I should ever want to do is post on Facefook.
SSDs were supposed to just act like normal hard drives, with a few extra hacked in features because unlike real hard drives they have to have hand-holding to deal with unused space, so how the fuck would the even forbid booting from a hard drive.
Oh, and fuck all this shit about "By 20xx we will convert to 100% whatever" People spewing that kind of shit are so tiring. Everything MUST be 100% such and such way. No exceptions. Exceptions are bad. People who are different are BAD. Anything old is BAD. Anyone who says otherwise is BAD. Right. Please die.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Friday June 10 2022, @12:41AM (4 children)
It turned out to be easier than fixing their issues with boot speed. Other OSes can figure out how to boot in a reasonable amount of time without resorting to SSD mandates.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by Reziac on Friday June 10 2022, @02:25AM (1 child)
Back in the Before Times, Macs had SCSI HDs because the system bus was so damn slow that otherwise boot took forever. So no, this isn't a new tactic.
And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday June 10 2022, @12:02PM
Macs had SCSI disks because USB hadn't been invented yet. They needed external connections and SCSI was the only game in town. The system bus was roughly equivalent to what PCs of the era used, but because the PC was an open platform and PCs mostly had enormous cases, they could afford the custom controllers for MFM type drives. Macs were never particularly concerned about cost, so the higher price of SCSI was irrelevant.
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Friday June 10 2022, @03:18AM (1 child)
Other OSs mostly boot with essential services running. Microsoft seems to boot with every available service running. It takes time to boot all those phone home services! It takes time to start those highly recommended anti-viruses that eat CPU cycles. It takes more time to auto-login to remote cloud services. I haven't made mention of Black Viper's services tweaking guides in quite a long time. He has always shaved a lot of time from boot times. Oooops
Looks like you'll have to use his Win10 guide, then eyeball whatever services Win11 might still have running. Or, find some other site that offers similar tweaking advice.
https://www.blackviper.com/ [blackviper.com]
Abortion is the number one killed of children in the United States.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday June 10 2022, @04:03AM
Yes, and I used to have software that would load one of those programs at time, and it massively sped up the boot process. MS just doesn't care about performance.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Friday June 10 2022, @01:19AM (6 children)
Nobody is selling devices with spinners if they can help it. But SSDs can be soldered to the motherboard, thus preventing you easily copying them out or turning sutff off in windows, etc.
And besides the software implications its much better for the OEM to sell its device with fixed HDD size up front and make you pay for upgrades. They already accomplished it with memory in most notebooks. This is next.
Desktops go to enthusiasts but most companies now give out notebooks and hey, they just get thinner and lighter without all those pesky slots.
(Score: 4, Informative) by Reziac on Friday June 10 2022, @02:28AM (5 children)
Thinner, lighter, cheaper to produce, and pretty much non-repairable.
Have you looked at what's inside a Surface Pro?? The principle is already established.
And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Friday June 10 2022, @02:22PM (4 children)
Yeah, but . . . uh . . . um . . .
SSDs have significant other advantages, such as less than half the vibration than a spinning drive.
How often should I have my memory checked? I used to know but...
(Score: 2) by Reziac on Friday June 10 2022, @03:17PM (3 children)
True enough! So, we're just doing what's best for our customers!!
And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Friday June 10 2022, @03:55PM (2 children)
Speak for yourself: vibration is a feature!
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Friday June 10 2022, @09:11PM (1 child)
I don't know who posted that, but I would reply that vibration detracts significantly from your ability to shoot at a fixed target. Even worse for a moving target.
How often should I have my memory checked? I used to know but...
(Score: 2) by Reziac on Saturday June 11 2022, @12:29AM
One suspects they were envisioning a slightly ...closer... target....
And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.
(Score: 3, Informative) by Runaway1956 on Friday June 10 2022, @03:08AM (4 children)
Already, Windows cannot be installed to a USB drive. But, I installed Windows 11 to a USB drive. Already, Windows decided that it didn't want to install to a machine without TPM2. But, I installed Windows 11 without TPM. Whatever Windows tells you that you cannot do, simply search the internet for the hack, and the internet will deliver. Those who submit to Microsoft either never had a nerd card, or they need to turn their nerd cards in to the Nerd Gods.
Abortion is the number one killed of children in the United States.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday June 10 2022, @05:05PM (3 children)
I installed Windows 11 in a VM to test to see if our software still works on it. But that's about it. It's not as if Windows 11 is suitable for serious use.
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Friday June 10 2022, @05:29PM
Much the same here. I first installed it into a VM. Then I installed it where there was no TPM. (Microsoft thinks that it has a TPM when installed into VMWare.) Then I installed it onto a USB drive to see how that worked. I actually got it running pretty well on a MacBOok - but installing the video drivers screws it up every time.
I've done much the same with various Linux distros. They don't whine and cry during testing.
Abortion is the number one killed of children in the United States.
(Score: 2) by bart9h on Sunday June 12 2022, @02:19AM (1 child)
There, I fixed it for you.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday June 12 2022, @04:13PM
I wish Wine could do more, like run my preferred tax application software properly. And play Tempest 4000 with the game's music. But until then, Windows still does have serious uses--taxes and Tempest.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Friday June 10 2022, @03:52AM (3 children)
I haven't built a box with new parts lately. My last hard drive was SATA. Does the interface even care? Why go out of your way to disable a device simply because it reports a certain type of underlying hardware to the interface? Couldn't manufacturers just *lie* and have the device report that it's a SSD? Other than being slower, how would the interface even know? OK, there's the idea I guess--disable anything that can't transfer data fast enough, and SSDs are the only thing that can do that?
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Friday June 10 2022, @12:06PM (2 children)
Presumably they mean you will have to boot from NVMe, and not from SATA at all. Everyone building new PCs is using NVMe now. Of course, most non OEM systems still have a few SATA ports, but fewer than they used to.
Seems unlikely to be a Windows 11 thing, but we all know Windows 12 will barely be an operating system as we know it, but rather a locked down appliance.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday June 10 2022, @04:02PM (1 child)
In the Tom's Hardware link it points out that this will essentially raise the price of low-end systems:
It also says that it isn't clear yet whether there will be any attempt at penalizing OEMs for ignoring this edict.
By the way, it really says something that 256GB isn't deemed to be enough size for the average user. I'm not disagreeing with this, but I lived through the floppy disk days when an 80MB drive was pretty darn big. What's the equivalent Moore's law for OS or general executable footprint, I wonder.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday June 11 2022, @09:58AM
It's considered a variation on Parkinson's Law ("Work expands to fill the time available.").
https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/396726/what-is-the-law-of-data-expands-to-fill-the-available-space [stackexchange.com]