Is it just me or Windows 10 is a lot slower on HDD's than its predecessors?

[Rafael Mestdag]

Is it just me and my pc or is Windows 10 a lot slower on mechanical drives than Windows 7 and 8.1 and even Vista?

 

[USAFRet]

Is it just me and my pc or is Windows 10 a lot slower on mechanical drives than Windows 7 and 8.1 and even Vista?

Yes, it is just you and your install.
I have a now 8 year old Tosh laptop. Runs on Win 10 pretty much exactly the same as it did on Win 7 or 8.1.

What is showing you that your system is now 'slower'?

 

[PC Tailor]

Have to say, I think it's just you. I've witnessed slight performance increases (generally) myself.
And I have ran multiple PCs of various ages with Windows 10 and never seen a problem with performance.

 

[dudeman509]

There are several Windows processes (compatibility telemetry and Windows Defender among one of them) that can peg a disk's usage at 100% in Windows 10. That will make the user experience quite slow.

 

[Rafael Mestdag]

Is it just me and my pc or is Windows 10 a lot slower on mechanical drives than Windows 7 and 8.1 and even Vista?

Yes, it is just you and your install.
I have a now 8 year old Tosh laptop. Runs on Win 10 pretty much exactly the same as it did on Win 7 or 8.1.

What is showing you that your system is now 'slower'?

Actually, it's been a long while since I last defragged my Windows 10 HDD and now that I've analized it using O&O Defrag, it says the disk is about 50% fragmented. It REALLY needs a defrag. Maybe that's the reason why it's so slow.

 

[USAFRet]

Is it just me and my pc or is Windows 10 a lot slower on mechanical drives than Windows 7 and 8.1 and even Vista?

Yes, it is just you and your install.
I have a now 8 year old Tosh laptop. Runs on Win 10 pretty much exactly the same as it did on Win 7 or 8.1.

What is showing you that your system is now 'slower'?

Actually, it's been a long while since I last defragged my Windows 10 HDD and now that I've analized it using O&O Defrag, it says the disk is about 50% fragmented. It REALLY needs a defrag. Maybe that's the reason why it's so slow.

Yes, that could be the issue.
That's why Windows defaults to a weekly defrag schedule. Change that, and you end up with 50% fragmentation.

 

[Bo Lee]

I run as fast as Windows 7 did. But yeah, 50 percent is bad. Defrag that thing now

 

[Rafael Mestdag]

I run as fast as Windows 7 did. But yeah, 50 percent is bad. Defrag that thing now

That's what I've been doing for the past three hours or so, lol. It's gonna take a long while as it seems.
By the way I find Windows' own defragmenter too slow, I'm currently using Defraggler to defrag and then I'm going to use O&O Defrag to move the files to the outer portion of the platter. It's a 75% full 2TB drive, so I guess I'll still be on it by tomorrow morning.

 

[Colif]

if anything it should seem faster than previous versions as with fast startup and the way Windows handles memory management now, the accessing of the drive should be less obvious than before. Depends how much ram you have.

 

[Rafael Mestdag]

if anything it should seem faster than previous versions as with fast startup and the way Windows handles memory management now, the accessing of the drive should be less obvious than before. Depends how much ram you have.

Actually I'm on Windows 7 now, it's the OS on my SSD, my main one. Windows 10 is my secondary OS on one of my HDD's.

 

[SkyNetRising]

There are several Windows processes (compatibility telemetry and Windows Defender among one of them) that can peg a disk's usage at 100% in Windows 10. That will make the user experience quite slow.

Also search indexer, windows updates, windows defragmenter - any of those can bring a mechanical hard drive to 100% usage and a whole system to unusable state until they have finished their job. On SSD it's far less noticeable.

 

[Bo Lee]

I run as fast as Windows 7 did. But yeah, 50 percent is bad. Defrag that thing now

That's what I've been doing for the past three hours or so, lol. It's gonna take a long while as it seems.
By the way I find Windows' own defragmenter too slow, I'm currently using Defraggler to defrag and then I'm going to use O&O Defrag to move the files to the outer portion of the platter. It's a 75% full 2TB drive, so I guess I'll still be on it by tomorrow morning.

Yeah, if it is fragmented bad and a large drive, it can take a long time. Hope it speeds you up when done

 

[ringswithin]

I run as fast as Windows 7 did. But yeah, 50 percent is bad. Defrag that thing now

That's what I've been doing for the past three hours or so, lol. It's gonna take a long while as it seems.
By the way I find Windows' own defragmenter too slow, I'm currently using Defraggler to defrag and then I'm going to use O&O Defrag to move the files to the outer portion of the platter. It's a 75% full 2TB drive, so I guess I'll still be on it by tomorrow morning.

if you check out iobit's smart defrag and driver manager (you can get the free download) i find them to be faster and very helpful. i don't care for their antivirus (some people like it) but you can get all of their different utilities for free. i really love that fast defrag and it also does a boot defrag that takes about 3 minutes. the regular defrag takes a bit longer depending on how fragmented you are, but not as long as the one you are using. i find the driver utility well worth the money if you choose to buy it.

 

[run1492]

Is it just me and my pc or is Windows 10 a lot slower on mechanical drives than Windows 7 and 8.1 and even Vista?

YOU ARE RIGHT.

I have an old HP laptop with only 1,5 gb RAM and a mechanical drive, and I can tell you that Windows 10 is using the hard disk at a rate that makes the operating system unusable. I had disabled services like windows search, defender, updates... and it keeps using the hard disk as a virus... The ram is 60% free when I'm testing this, but the problem is disk access.

I have tried almost three times to make a NEW install OF Windows 10 in this laptop, and every time I've tried I get the same frustrating experience. Avoid Windows 10 on old pcs as hell.

The difference with Windows 8.1 is inmense; Windows 8.1 works very well, no hard disk abuse. Everything smooth if you keep the system with the basic software like Office (latest), Chrome and a few more things.
I repeat, I recommend keeping Windows 8.1. Even faster than Windows 7, take it for sure.

Forget all those websites recommending installing windows 10 on low-end pcs because it's 'optimized' and all that. They lie or did not made proper testing; Don't waste the time of your life.

 

[SkyNetRising]

Forget all those websites recommending installing windows 10 on low-end pcs because it's 'optimized' and all that. They lie or did not made proper testing; Don't waste the time of your life.

Just upgrade to SSD.That solves most of 100% disk usage problems.
Even your old laptop will strongly benefit from such upgrade.