Thursday, June 9th 2022
OEMs Under Pressure from Microsoft to Stop Use of HDDs as Boot Drives from 2023
PC OEMs have revealed to market intelligence firm Trendfocus that Microsoft wants them to stop the use of hard-disk drives (HDDs, or mechanical hard-drives) as the main boot device in products powered by Windows 11, from 2023. It's not known how the company will go about enforcing this. One theory holds that it may amend the Minimum System Requirements for the operating system to specify a flash-based storage device, such as an SSD. If push comes to shove, the OS could even refuse to deploy on a machine with an HDD as the boot device.
What's also not known is how this affects SSHDs (hard drives with tiny flash-based storage media and an access-based data-juggling mechanism). Microsoft's decision should come as a boon for entry-level notebook and desktop buyers; as this segment sees OEMs use HDDs as the boot device, the most. There could be a push toward at least DRAMless QLC SSDs, or even single-chip SSDs. Regardless, it's clear that 2.5-inch HDDs are on their way out of the industry. HDD as a technology may still exist in the 3.5-inch form-factor, as they are in high demand from the data-center and surveillance markets as cold storage devices.
Source:
Tom's Hardware
What's also not known is how this affects SSHDs (hard drives with tiny flash-based storage media and an access-based data-juggling mechanism). Microsoft's decision should come as a boon for entry-level notebook and desktop buyers; as this segment sees OEMs use HDDs as the boot device, the most. There could be a push toward at least DRAMless QLC SSDs, or even single-chip SSDs. Regardless, it's clear that 2.5-inch HDDs are on their way out of the industry. HDD as a technology may still exist in the 3.5-inch form-factor, as they are in high demand from the data-center and surveillance markets as cold storage devices.
93 Comments on OEMs Under Pressure from Microsoft to Stop Use of HDDs as Boot Drives from 2023
I suffer every day at work with a computer with 6c/12t and 16Gb of RAM but with a very slow hard drive.
I turn it on upon arrival and literally start doing other things before I can use it.
On topic: “It's not known how the company will go about enforcing this.”
Easy! Just like modern AAA Games load glacial slow on the average HDD. Customers will either waste time or pay for an upgrade.
Seeing that a lot of OEM / SI businesses still list an SSD boot drive as a “premium”-upgrade option, I also don't see them changing a thing any time soon.
Seriously though, I haven't owned any for a long, long time...
Yeah, cloud is not my thing.
256GB is ample for a OS drive to include updates to it, office/adobe etc put everything else on a second drive.
Integrated ssds are bogus
in Bad Side : Microsoft keep making bloatware OS that so heavy with bunch useless feature, that require SSD to run their OS properly, i miss windows 7 simplicity
People buying bargain basement laptops probably dont need more space than a 128/256 gig SSD anyway. Especially now we also have cloud storage service.
I've slowly been taking advantage of SSDs over the years. Where there was a hard drive, there's now an SSD.
I'm no longer getting hard
*turns on user laptop*
*doesnt feel vibrations or feels/hears faint clicking*
Yup the hard drive is bad
Win 10/11 is resource hungry so hard disk will have difficulty to catch up with lots of background task unlike Win 7 or Win 8.1.
However hard disk price per gigabyte is better than SSD so I find it contradicting for OEM to come out with such statement.
Some laptop/PC build either comes with HDD or crappy SSD and the PC itself is a pain to use.
I rather OEM use a good small SSD just for boot drive to save on cost than using hard disk.
They don't care. Literally. Most only care about their cat pictures that are nowadays in their phone anyway.
Enthusiasts are a different thing. I have to backup a ton of of stuff and restore bunch of programs if a do a clean install.
I remember doing these monthly when i was younger and wanted to test out things (plus VM's were not really a thing back then).
Now i do it only as a last resort.
Even with Au prices, SSD's are incredibly cheap these days - OEM bulk prices would be far less than this, and mostly MS wants to alter how budget devices perform so smaller capacaties are to be expected
The only reason machines are still sold with mech drives is to make them seem better to non tech-savvy folk by a bigger storage number, and selling old stock