According to a new report, Microsoft wants manufacturers to ditch traditional boot hard drives, in favor of SSDs, by 2023.
In recent years solid-state drives (SSDs) have dropped in price and increased in capacity to the point of being more competitive with traditional hard disk drives (HDDs). SSDs offer a number of advantages, including speed and durability. As a result, according to Tom’s Hardware, Microsoft is pushing OEMs to make the switch to SSDs for boot drives by 2023.
Unfortunately, despite how far SSDs have come, the price and capacity is still not quite on par with HDDs. While this is not an issue with high-performance computers, it can be a breaking point for budget PCs.
“The original cut-in date based on our discussions with OEMs was to be this year, but it has been pushed out to sometime next year (the second half, I believe, but not clear on the firm date),” Trendfocus Vice President John Chen told Tom’s Hardware. “OEMs are trying to negotiate some level of push out (emerging market transition in 2024, or desktop transition in 2024), but things are still in flux.”
One option is the one that has already gained popularity, combining a boot SSD with a larger HDD for data storage. By using the SSD for the operating system and applications, and offloading data to the HDD, OEMs and their customers could have the best of both worlds.
