I'm wondering if windows 10 will have reduced hard drive thrashing, faster update/boot/shutdown time, less memory and hd footprint and so on. It would be nice for a change to see a system drive going to sleep after 2 or 3 minutes of inactivity.
I agree.
Now is the beginning of the end for hard drives.
The limiting factor here is old hardware- one cannot simply make older hardware move faster.
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Holy crap, are you kidding?
8.1 can boot within seconds, if you have an SSD and a UEFI motherboard. The limiting factor here is old hardware- one cannot simply make older hardware move faster. If you want that boot time you MUST upgrade to an SSD, it MUST be partitioned with GPT, and your motherboard MUST support UEFI. These are the things that were created to improve boot time (among other things), they're here, go get them.
So boot time has already been solved by 8, what about performance? My 1GB of memory, 800Mhz CPU device (which is BELOW 8's minimum spec requirement) runs 8.1 very fast- much faster than Vista or 7 because of the performance optimizations and lower memory usage. So 8.1 is the lightest, fastest Windows since XP SP3 (also infinitely more stable and less prone to slowing down)- what exactly hasn't been optimized here?
Other things of note- sleeping a hdd doesn't prolong it's life, it just might save electricity (if that's your goal, get an SSD). The "thrashing" of an HDD happens for a few hours after the initial install of Windows while it takes care of things in the background. Otherwise hdd is accessed for caching and library purposes while you're using Windows and if you want to get rid of that you must also get rid of speedy boot times and general performance...
points 1 and 2 are very fair. But for point 3, thrashing is happening constantly. On a laptop, it might be disastrous. And my main computer, fresh install- about 3 months, w8.1, still requires more than a 2 minutes on a mechanical drive to boot up from hybrid shutdown, because there is a difference between boot to desktop and "ok now i can use my pc cause the thrashing has subsided"
you dont see it because you know how to keep your machine nice and tidy.
There is an equilibrium point if that hibernation file reaches multi gb size versus cold booting.
Well, to be honest, you've referenced 3 different sets of configs in this thread. But the Blue series WDs are their entry level models.
Also, what is the system state being hibernated - apps open, files open, pages open, etc? There is an equilibrium point if that hibernation file reaches multi gb size versus cold booting. My 2 year old Lenovo M93 desktop with W8.1/hdd/4GB and on a domain network just took under a minute to cold boot, log in, process group policies, start Outlook, and load Chrome.