Yeah, hard drives are never going to be great (although 15k rpm drives aren't too bad), but IMHO, the real thing that causes perf to be awful is that windows 10 (and I assume 11 has gotten worse) can't seem to ever stop writing to the disk. Those writes seem to interrupt reads enough that you never can get good sustained read speeds, so loading anything is painful.
I'm not going to setup a system to test, because it's too painful, but I'm now idly wondering if you could set the checkbox on a hard drive for "Turn off Windows write-cache buffer flushing on the device", and if that would help. Doing a aggregated write of a couple MB once a minute would probably work better than doing a few KB every second. Of course, at great risk of data loss, but YOLO. (a smidge of research seems to indicate this is for asking the device to pretty-please flush its internal write cache, so that might help a bit, but probably not very much; maybe there's a knob somewhere to tune the system file cache)
I'm not going to setup a system to test, because it's too painful, but I'm now idly wondering if you could set the checkbox on a hard drive for "Turn off Windows write-cache buffer flushing on the device", and if that would help. Doing a aggregated write of a couple MB once a minute would probably work better than doing a few KB every second. Of course, at great risk of data loss, but YOLO. (a smidge of research seems to indicate this is for asking the device to pretty-please flush its internal write cache, so that might help a bit, but probably not very much; maybe there's a knob somewhere to tune the system file cache)