Going Slow? It’s almost certainly your hard disk

The Hard Disk Drive (HDD)

The HDD is a rotating-mass drive, a bit like an ultra hi-tech gramophone, and has metal or metal-coated glass disks spinning at a very high speed where the data is read and then decoded by complicated electronics. The speed at which data can be used is partly dictated by how fast the disk can spin. The standard size for a PC HDD is 3.5 inches, typical reading speed is up to 170MB/s. Windows 10 & 11 hate your HDD

The SATA Solid-State Drive (SSD)

A solid-state drive is exactly that, solid. It has no moving parts and is instead crammed with special high-speed memory chips and clever technology. Due to increasing popularity, the prices have come down massively over recent years bringing this technology within affordable reach of the masses. The standard size of a SATA SSD is 2.5 inches, typical reading speed is 550MB/s. Windows 10 & 11 love your SSD

Non-Volatile Memory Express (NVME) M.2

NVME M.2 drives are much smaller than a SATA SSD and are commonly found in modern laptops. Consisting entirely of memory chips and accessed via the PCI-e interface which is much faster than SATA (SATA has a top speed of 600MB/s). NVME 3rd generation drives can run at up to 3500MB/s. A 4th generation NVME drive can run at up to 7,100MB/s. Windows 10 & 11 both really love your NVME drive