Windows 10 and spinning rust
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Am I the only one that finds that with the new updates windows 10 is completely unusable unless you have an SSD? We have some older laptops as well as some new laptops with not so good CPUs and they are completely unusable unless there's an SSD inside. Once you replace the spinning rust with an SSD, they fly.
Previously you would see 100% usage on the disk.
Did windows basically just decide to forget all about reading things sequentially and prefetching, etc and has now tuned all the code for random reads? Something funky is going on here.
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You're not imagining it. I see this too...
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I would say it's a matter of optimising for the common case, but it looks like 1TB 5400rpm drives are still standard in cheap laptops
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Windows 10 does a lot more with the disk, especially on cheap machines with small amounts of RAM. The worst part is when you're trying to load a map in a game, and the game is on the system disk, and Windows Modules Installer Worker is hard at work. Unlike most antivirus systems, there's no option to tell WMIW to back off while a game is running...
Of course, the definition of "small amount" in the context of RAM has shifted ever upwards, so now it's almost the case that 8GB is "small".
And of course maybe some gonk messed with the algorithms for choosing the page to discard / page out somewhere along the way, although perhaps "messed up" would be more appropriate.
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@dangeRuss i've switched my disk to 2tb ssd about a month ago, and... now you're telling me that the reason why i thought my spinning rust has been failing for the past half a year was... just this?
i mean - i did want larger and faster disk for some time, and it's great, but still...
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I'd also note that this problem is real, and has been a problem since probably 2017 and definitely it was there with 2018H2. (1809?)
Maybe it's even worse now, but it's not new.
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What's your RAM usage look like?
My older tablet with Windows 10 32-bit (so somewhat less RAM and storage space usage than most Windows 10 installs) sits with 1.6 GB of its 2 GB RAM used with "nothing" running. Start up a modern
RAM hogweb browser and a bunch of that needs to be kicked out to make room, then paged back in as needed. While the tablet has flash, it's not the fastest storage (or CPU) and there are definitely delays when doing anything. I'm sure it'd be very slow with a hard drive.This computer idles around 4 GB out of 16 used, but it has 64-bit Windows and runs more background junk than my convertible tablet.
IIRC, Windows 10 is also pretty aggressive with paging things out and caching things it thinks you will want in the future, stuff you probably don't notice on a good SSD but would on a hard drive even if it doesn't affect what you're doing with the computer at the moment. (SSDs don't normally make noises. :)
If you're stuck with a hard drive but you have an available USB port or memory card slot you might find the ReadyBoost feature helpful. I honestly have never tried it, but in theory this is the situation where it improves things.
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@dangeRuss said in Windows 10 and spinning rust:
Once you replace the spinning rust with an SSD, they fly.
HDDs slow, SSDs fast.
Plus if these are older drives, then the age of the drives may well be playing its part here.
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@sh_code said in Windows 10 and spinning rust:
now you're telling me that the reason why i thought my spinning rust has been failing for the past half a year was... just this?
It may also have been failing
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@loopback0 said in Windows 10 and spinning rust:
@sh_code said in Windows 10 and spinning rust:
now you're telling me that the reason why i thought my spinning rust has been failing for the past half a year was... just this?
It may also have been failing
Sounds like it was definitely defective – it had Windows 10 on it.
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@dangeRuss said in Windows 10 and spinning rust:
Am I the only one that finds that with the new updates windows 10 is completely unusable unless you have an SSD?
Since I have now finished converting all machines to SSDs...
Oh wait, there's still one rust bucket. And yeah, it's slow as shit. Has been for a long time.
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@kazitor said in Windows 10 and spinning rust:
@loopback0 said in Windows 10 and spinning rust:
@sh_code said in Windows 10 and spinning rust:
now you're telling me that the reason why i thought my spinning rust has been failing for the past half a year was... just this?
It may also have been failing
Sounds like it was definitely defective – it had Windows 10 on it.
Until they finally get round to releasing windows 11 it's the best available
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@loopback0 said in Windows 10 and spinning rust:
@dangeRuss said in Windows 10 and spinning rust:
Once you replace the spinning rust with an SSD, they fly.
HDDs slow, SSDs fast.
Plus if these are older drives, then the age of the drives may well be playing its part here.
The thing is some of these machines were perfectly usable in the past. And a couple were brand new, bought a few months ago (Lenovo for $250 with Pentium Gold CPU). Completely unusable (although I think they were fine out of the box until windows updates).
I mean SSDs are so cheap that it makes no sense not to have one. And yet they still make laptops with spinning rust. And most people do not have the skills to replace the drive and reinstall windows. Even I had trouble. I installed memtest86 on the USB drive and windows wouldn't let me remove the EFI partition on there after memtest created a 256MB partition in my 32GB drive. Had to so some magic incantations in diskpart to get it to delete. Thats a wtf in itself. What happened to the good old fdisk?
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@loopback0 said in Windows 10 and spinning rust:
It may also have been failing
That depends. Is your name @Tsaukpaetra?
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@HardwareGeek said in Windows 10 and spinning rust:
@loopback0 said in Windows 10 and spinning rust:
It may also have been failing
That depends. Is your name @Tsaukpaetra?
I elect @Tsaukpaetra to do like the Backblaze disk report thing only with hardware he has killed versus hardware he hasn't.
You could even write an app to run it and run the app on an old machine until it fails!
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@loopback0 said in Windows 10 and spinning rust:
@dangeRuss said in Windows 10 and spinning rust:
Once you replace the spinning rust with an SSD, they fly.
HDDs slow, SSDs fast.
That didn't used to be the case. It used to be "HDD fast, SSD even faster." But now that the faster access is available, developers have been relying on it and coding up even heavier hardware usage, which kinda defeats the purpose of the hardware getting faster in the first place.
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@Mason_Wheeler said in Windows 10 and spinning rust:
developers have been relying on it and
coding up even heavier hardware usagejust adding additional javascript libraries
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@Mason_Wheeler said in Windows 10 and spinning rust:
@loopback0 said in Windows 10 and spinning rust:
@dangeRuss said in Windows 10 and spinning rust:
Once you replace the spinning rust with an SSD, they fly.
HDDs slow, SSDs fast.
That didn't used to be the case. It used to be "HDD fast, SSD even faster." But now that the faster access is available, developers have been relying on it and coding up even heavier hardware usage, which kinda defeats the purpose of the hardware getting faster in the first place.
Depends on what you think the purpose of having faster hardware is.
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@boomzilla To run the computer faster. If developers go and cancel it out by making the computer slower faster than it's getting faster, that defeats the purpose.
And computers are definitely getting slower faster than they're getting faster. My first computer was an Apple IIe. It could go from power-off to software loaded in about 5-10 seconds, even with a slow 5 1/4" floppy drive. Modern Windows 10 systems, even on a SSD and with quick boot technology enabled, take a minute or more.
My first game console was a NES. Hit power and the game starts up instantly. My PS4 has a noticeable boot process, as has every PlayStation generation before it, and they take longer each time. Haven't gotten the PS5 yet, but I wouldn't place any money on it having gotten faster!
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@Mason_Wheeler said in Windows 10 and spinning rust:
@boomzilla To run the computer faster. If developers go and cancel it out by making the computer slower faster than it's getting faster, that defeats the purpose.
Sure, if that's all they did. But even then, maybe not if it's easier / cheaper to develop new stuff with the looser resource constraints.
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@boomzilla said in Windows 10 and spinning rust:
@Mason_Wheeler said in Windows 10 and spinning rust:
@boomzilla To run the computer faster. If developers go and cancel it out by making the computer slower faster than it's getting faster, that defeats the purpose.
Sure, if that's all they did. But even then, maybe not if it's easier / cheaper to develop new stuff with the looser resource constraints.
Yeah, I can see an argument for that, particularly if it's only used once. The problem is that it isn't. It keeps compounding upon itself with every new generation of hardware, until before you know it you end up with Node!
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@Mason_Wheeler said in Windows 10 and spinning rust:
@boomzilla said in Windows 10 and spinning rust:
@Mason_Wheeler said in Windows 10 and spinning rust:
@boomzilla To run the computer faster. If developers go and cancel it out by making the computer slower faster than it's getting faster, that defeats the purpose.
Sure, if that's all they did. But even then, maybe not if it's easier / cheaper to develop new stuff with the looser resource constraints.
Yeah, I can see an argument for that, particularly if it's only used once. The problem is that it isn't. It keeps compounding upon itself with every new generation of hardware, until before you know it you end up with Node!
They got so many levels of (fragile) abstractions, they can't even see the turtles below any more.
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@Mason_Wheeler said in Windows 10 and spinning rust:
Haven't gotten the PS5 yet, but I wouldn't place any money on it having gotten faster!
Depends if the new OS counteracts the benefits of moving from spinning rust to NVMe storage. I just know the Xbox Series X is A LOT faster than the Xbox One X at booting.
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@Mason_Wheeler said in Windows 10 and spinning rust:
If developers go and cancel it out by making the computer slower faster than it's getting faster, that defeats the purpose.
Except that sometimes (not always!) that extra “slower” is because people have demanded that the software do more, and that things that were simply unacceptably slow before have now become practical to do at all. Expectations change.
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@Mason_Wheeler said in Windows 10 and spinning rust:
And computers are definitely getting slower faster than they're getting faster. My first computer was an Apple IIe. It could go from power-off to software loaded in about 5-10 seconds, even with a slow 5 1/4" floppy drive. Modern Windows 10 systems, even on a SSD and with quick boot technology enabled, take a minute or more.
Do notice that Quick Boot == Hibernate. So, in worst case, all your RAM gets written to (and read from) the disk. If you have 32GB of the stuff, well...
Mine starts up in less than half a minute, and I have Quick Boot disabled.My first game console was a NES. Hit power and the game starts up instantly.
A program executed directly from solid-state ROM.
My PS4 has a noticeable boot process, as has every PlayStation generation before it, and they take longer each time.
They have an OS. with a network stack. It'd be nice to see a profiling on which part takes how long.
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I have a somewhat relevant anecdote from a few years ago: I have a Macbook that originally came with a hard drive. It's one of the last upgradeable ones, before they soldered in all the RAM and storage. It worked fine, but eventually I upgraded it to an SSD. After the upgrade, the computer would boot so fast that Steam would auto-start before the wifi had time to connect, and then exit because it didn't have a network connection.
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@acrow said in Windows 10 and spinning rust:
Mine starts up in less than half a minute, and I have Quick Boot disabled.
Mine too, even with losing a few seconds to the UEFI booting then the RAID BIOS then the UEFI again (each with a couple of seconds of "PRESS X TO ENTER SETUP") then Windows. It's mostly 5 years old.
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@loopback0 said in Windows 10 and spinning rust:
the RAID BIOS
You need a group of friends to tackle that.
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@acrow said in Windows 10 and spinning rust:
@Mason_Wheeler said in Windows 10 and spinning rust:
And computers are definitely getting slower faster than they're getting faster. My first computer was an Apple IIe. It could go from power-off to software loaded in about 5-10 seconds, even with a slow 5 1/4" floppy drive. Modern Windows 10 systems, even on a SSD and with quick boot technology enabled, take a minute or more.
Do notice that Quick Boot == Hibernate.
This must be JavaScript's ==, because Quick Boot doesn't restore running programs while hibernation does.
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@Gąska said in Windows 10 and spinning rust:
@acrow said in Windows 10 and spinning rust:
@Mason_Wheeler said in Windows 10 and spinning rust:
And computers are definitely getting slower faster than they're getting faster. My first computer was an Apple IIe. It could go from power-off to software loaded in about 5-10 seconds, even with a slow 5 1/4" floppy drive. Modern Windows 10 systems, even on a SSD and with quick boot technology enabled, take a minute or more.
Do notice that Quick Boot == Hibernate.
This must be JavaScript's ==, because Quick Boot doesn't restore running programs while hibernation does.
What Fast Startup does is (effectively) Hibernate from the login screen, so nothing user-specific is running.
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@Parody so how does login screen take up 32GB of RAM?
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@Gąska said in Windows 10 and spinning rust:
@Parody so how does login screen take up 32GB of RAM?
They're writing the unused RAM to page file, too.
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@Gąska said in Windows 10 and spinning rust:
@Parody so how does login screen take up 32GB of RAM?
The size of HIBERFIL.SYS doesn't necessarily represent how much is written to it. IIRC, the default is 75% of your system RAM.
I disable Hibernation (and thus Fast Startup) on all my machines because I don't want to waste the space. On SSD desktops my experience is the same as @acrow's: they boot fast enough that it's not worth the hassle. You also don't have to worry about the difference between Shutdown (doesn't kill everything) and Restart (does).
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@Parody I think you missed my point. @acrow was saying that Quick Boot actually slows down things on non-SSDs because it has to write down all that RAM to the disk.
I hate when multiple people get into the same argument with me. They can never keep their story straight.
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@Gąska said in Windows 10 and spinning rust:
@Parody I think you missed my point. @acrow was saying that Quick Boot actually slows down things on non-SSDs because it has to write down all that RAM to the disk.
I hate when multiple people get into the same argument with me. They can never keep their story straight.
Fine: he said "in the worst case". Fast Startup is unlikely to need to compress and write all of your RAM (but it might). The couple of GB it does need can still take a bit to write on a hard drive or even slow flash.
Even if it does end up being a boot speedup on a particular device, I still don't think it's worth the hassle.
Urban Dictionary: raid boss