Good Riddance to Mechanical Hard Drives as Boot Drives

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Hard drives are fantastic storage devices for servers and things of that nature, especially when used in a RAID array. You get a very large amount of storage for very cheap this way, and especially once you get to speeds like 7200rpm, the speed at which data can be accessed is more than adequate. But I will forever be grateful that hard drives containing a computer’s operating system have largely gone the way of the dodo in consumer PCs, and yet furious that it took this long for it to happen.

Of course, hard drives on their own are only part of the problem. As far as I understand it, while operating systems of the past were designed around the limitations of mechanical drives, since everyone was using them to run their software in the 90s and 2000s, with the advent of solid state drives, software can be written much less carefully with regards to file I/O since SSDs are so much faster with regards to accessing multiple files in different places in succession. This is mostly fine by me since even my first computer came with an SSD (I am not very old). Most high-end laptops that released during the 2010s start moving over to SSD technology, especially once the MacBook Air fully moved to it (Apple abandons a lot of technology inappropriately, but this is one case where I think they were definitely correct).

However, for many mid-range devices, even from large vendors like HP and Dell, things did not actually change until much later. Which creates a bit of a problem.

We have laptops sold in 2017 with storage designed for 2007 software

All of this build-up is to say, I recently took a look at my grandpa’s personal laptop, as he was wondering if it is suitable for continued use. It was an HP laptop with a 7th gen core i5, but I imagine it had to be one of the lower-wattage series because it had a measly 10W battery (maybe a red flag from the get-go?). Being a 7th gen Intel processor, that automatically raises concerns about its long-term use since Windows 11 drops support for all Intel processors 7th gen and older , and Windows 10 will stop receiving security updates in 5 months .

But, and maybe this should be obvious to me given its measly battery and the CPU wattage that implies, the computer was agonizingly slow to use. I don’t love using a description that imprecise to describe a computer’s performance (so to be more specific, the OS took minutes to boot and even afterward apps like File Explorer took even more minutes to open, likely due to slow storage, which I am getting into), but it was genuinely so bad. Apparently my grandpa hadn’t even bothered using it for a year, which I can believe given how he still retains his sanity.

Of course, the hard drive itself was loud enough that I was already fairly certain from booting the computer that it didn’t have an SSD. But I feel like now is a good time to make a call out posts to manufacturers like HP: WHY DID YOU KEEP SELLING THESE PIECES OF GARBAGE FOR SO LONG?!?!?

The worst part is that in spite of the tiny battery, I genuinely believe this computer would probably be perfectly decent to use if it weren’t for its meanderingly slow storage. Obviously I wouldn’t use it to run something like Marvel Rivals, especially since that game barely runs well on my Steam Deck, but for what my grandpa does—browsing the web and writing emails—yeah, it should totally be fine!

How to prevent ewaste

The great news is that this laptop was also released during a time when only Apple was really known for the shite practice of soldering on storage and memory to their laptops so it could never be upgraded or repaired. I actually have a similar situation I faced a few years back with a friend’s gaming laptop (also manufactured by HP if memory serves me right) with a mechanical hard drive. On paper the device should have been a perfectly great computer, even better than my own computer (a Framework Laptop 13 with 12th gen Intel), and yet the thing was sluggish. So I offered to clone the drive to an SSD and replace it, and lo and behold, the thing was usable again. Thankfully SATA SSDs tend to be fairly cheap, especially from my beloved TeamGroup, even if theirs are of dubious quality (I haven’t had any problems yet but YMMV), so at the end of it all the upgrade only cost maybe $50 for 1tb of storage (for comparison, upgrading the SSD in an entry-model MacBook Air from 256gb to 512gb costs $200 ).

I hope to achieve similar results with my grandpa’s laptop. As for its OS, I’ll see (with his permission, of course) how Ubuntu fares on it by comparison. Sure, there are lighter Linux distros available, but I appreciate that Ubuntu makes upgrading between LTS releases easy and command-line free (I think), and since I’m unsure how often my grandpa will be bothered to update his system, this is one case where the Snap packaging system actually takes a rare W, since it automatically updates apps by default. This way his web browsing will at least remain secure, which is probably the most important thing for a consumer PC’s security anyway. Best of all, if he does choose to update his system, he can enjoy 10 years of security updates for a given LTS release if he makes an account (this is starting to read like an Ubuntu ad lol).

[jargon incoming for my non-technical readers]

I was considering Linux Mint, but I’m unsure if it would be a great fit in terms of upgrades since upgrading between major releases requires fishing for a hidden “upgrade” button in the software updater , and since its versions of Chromium and Firefox are seemingly updated from Linux Mint’s own repos, I believe failure to upgrade to the next major release will result in losing browser updates once the Linux Mint team stops updating the repos of the old OS release. My concern is that my grandpa would not upgrade Linux Mint, and then be stuck with an outdated browser version. A potential solution to this is Flatpak, but even that won’t automatically upgrade unless you set that up manually. Unless Ubuntu’s interface really confuses him (I wouldn’t blame him), I would prefer to play it safe with something that is more aggressive on keeping things updated.

Anyway that is where I’m at currently on my journey to make my grandpa’s computer fresh and usable again, and why I curse hard drives for making it so slow in the first place. Though honestly, Windows needed to go either way…