According to an report from Tom’s Hardware, Microsoft plans to allow PC makers to ship solid-state boot drives in all Windows PCs by 2023 or 2024, ending the days of spinning hard drives for most PCs that still contain them.
Trendfocus analyst John Chen claims Microsoft initially tried to make the change in 2022, but resistance from manufacturers meant “it’s been delayed until sometime next year.” Microsoft and the PC makers are still negotiating the timeline and possible exceptions, “but things are still in flux.”
Ars contacted Microsoft, Dell, HP, Lenovo and Acer for comment; most have not responded. A Dell representative pointed out that almost all of its systems already ship with SSDs, but could not confirm or deny the analyst’s claims.
That brings up a good point: the vast majority of new systems, from cheap laptops to gaming desktops to premium Ultrabooks, come with SSD boot drives and have done so for years. Some solid-state storage is better than others — cheap eMMC storage in a budget laptop won’t be nearly as fast as the cheapest NVMe SSD — but today only the most budget-friendly desktops still use hard drives as their primary storage.
Microsoft also maintains requirements for the PC manufacturers that are different from the core Windows system requirements. The manufacturers had to provide and enable features like Secure Boot and a Trusted Platform Module (TPM) for years before Windows 11 started requiring them for all Windows installations. That is, even if the PC companies can’t sell you a computer with a rotating hard drive as your boot drive, Windows is less likely to refuse to install on a rotating hard drive if you need it for some reason. . The current system requirements for Windows 11 dictate 64 GB or more of storage capacity, but do not specify what kind of storage to use.
A cursory check of the Dell and HP websites plus new desktop listings on Newegg suggests that an SSD requirement would primarily hit two market segments for US PC buyers. One is the low end of the consumer desktop market, where a handful of Inspiron and Pavilion systems still ship without SSDs. The other is the enterprise desktop market, where Optiplex, Vostro, and ProDesk systems incorporate HDDs into base models. As Chen points out, the requirement could also hit harder in more price-sensitive “development” markets outside the US.
The systems that still use spinning hard drives mostly use 1TB models. Considering that a good branded 1TB hard drive and an entry-level 250GB or 500GB SSD are all available for between $40 and $50, it should at least be possible for the manufacturers to make the switch without raising prices (although manufacturers’ prices for PC components are different than for end-users). Trading that capacity for vastly faster speeds is the right move for most people — not everyone has 1TB of data to store locally, but everyone shall notice and enjoy faster boot times, app and game launch times, and multitasking.
Even if they mostly disappear from consumer PCs, hard drives continue to evolve. Most efforts are now focused on increasing the capacity of disc platters using new data recording technologies. Seagate claims to aim for 100TB hard drives by 2030, while Western Digital announced large 22TB and 26TB hard drives for data centers and other high-storage customers.
