At Microcenter you can buy a house brand SSD hard drive with 128G on it for $58 and boot from that and store all your other files on a D:\ regular hard drive. That is how I set up my son's Windows 10 gaming rig.
Yeah, my main PC is all SSDs. I might replace my laptop's mechanical disk with an SSD but i use it very rarely. If anything i use my retro(ish) PC more often than my laptop so i'm thinking i might buy a cheap SSD for that instead :-P.
Just know you can run a full Linux desktop experience on top of twenty-year-old spinning rust just fine. Micro$oft drooped the ball big time if one needs a ssd just to use a OS.
How is Windows using SSD to its fullest? All it seems to be doing is taking advantage of the greater speed to perform more I/O that it didn't do before which negates any performance improvements the SSD brings.
I'm not sure this is the right take, as I don't believe it's a matter of choosing to optimize for SSD vs. HDD's. Disks got faster, so the bar for baseline acceptable performance got higher.
You are completely missing their point. "For newer hardware" means slower. I remember how Windows 7 was so well-designed that it actually ran faster on my all of my old XP machines than XP did. It was a step up in performance, not a step down.
In 2018 Microsoft disbanded the Windows team and moved engineering efforts to its cloud and AI teams. Windows 10 is on life support by engineers who aren't intimately familiar with its codebase. Performance and usability will only degrade in this situation and the specifications of newer hardware don't excuse constant deterioration in performance.
The people are still there, but there's no organizational impetus to always use them, plus they have other duties now. The team being disbanded means a loss in product tightness and quality control.
