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Comment by mschuster91 | Hacker News Reader

Part of why Windows feels sluggish is because a lot of the components in many Windows machines are dogshit - especially storage. Even the old M2 is at 1400 MB/s write speed [2], M5 is at 6068 MB/s [2]. Meanwhile in the Windows world, supposed "gamer" laptops struggle to get above 3 GB/s [3]. And on top of that, on Apple devices the storage is directly attached to the SoC - as far as I know, no PCIe, no nothing, just dumb NAND. That alone eliminates a lot of latency, and communication data paths are direct as well, with nothing pesky like sockets or cables degrading signal quality and requiring link training and whatnot.

That M2 MBA however, it only feels sluggish at > 400 Chrome tabs open because only then swapping becomes a real annoyance.

[1] https://9to5mac.com/2022/07/14/m2-macbook-air-slower-ssd-bas...

[2] https://www.tomshardware.com/laptops/macbooks/m5-macbook-pro...

[3] https://www.reddit.com/r/AcerNitro/comments/1i0nbt4/slow_ssd...

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> Part of why Windows feels sluggish is because a lot of the components in many Windows machines are dogshit - especially storage.

Except that you can replace Windows with Linux and suddenly it doesn't feel like dogshit anymore. SSDs are fast enough that they should be adding zero perceived latency for ordinary day-to-day operation. In fact, Linux still runs great on a pure spinning disk setup, which is something no other OS can manage today.

Battery life is poor though.

Hmm, for most desktop stuff, you're still limited to random access, where even if leagues above HDD, the NVMe still suck compared to sequential. It's sad that intel killed Optane/3D X-point, because those are mych better at random workloads and they had still lower latencies than the latest NVMe (not by much anymore).

Thing is, with Apple, even the bottom of the barrel entry devices (aka MBAs) get the high performance storage.

With Windows, you're probably still getting SATA and not even NVMe.

Windows laptops have been pretty much exclusively NVMe for years. The 2.5" SATA form factor was a waste of space that laptop OEMs were very happy to be rid of, first with mSATA then with M.2 using SATA or NVMe. NVMe finished displacing SATA years ago, when the widespread availability of hardware supporting the NVMe Host Memory Buffer feature meant that entry-level NVMe SSDs could be both faster and cheaper than the good SATA SSDs. Most of the major SSD vendors discontinued their M.2 SATA SSDs long ago, indicating that demand for that product segment had collapsed.

Yeah I can tell this guy has not bought a SATA drive in a while.

The options in that space are increasingly dwindling which is a problem when supporting older machines.

Sometimes it is cheaper to get a sketchy m2 ssd and adapter than to get an actual sata drive from one of the larger manufactures.

I don't understand why Optane hasn't been revived already for modern AI datacenter workloads. Being able to augment and largely replace system RAM across the board with something cheaper (though not as cheap as NAND, and more power-hungry too) ought to be a huge plus, even if the technology isn't suitable for replacing HBM or VRAM due to bulk/power constraints.

It’s also tremendously durable, NAND doesn’t get close in write endurance.

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