I ran across this article today. Microsoft wants to get rid of HDD boot drives by 2023. Ostensibly,this deals with Windows; but there is a Linux angle here.

I have often wondered, over the years, why no-one has proposed to use either a flash drive or an SD Card located on the motherboard to boot solely the operating system of the computer. Maybe there have been proposals, but I have not heard of them.

Why so long to get around to this type of proposal?

Do a search on eMMC - chromebooks for example.

I think SSD is ready to replace HDD.

HDD technology has been around since at least the mid 1980s (that's as far back as I remember), and is very mature. But it really hasn't improved much in the last decade. SSD tech has been around for better than a decade, and has only improved in all areas. It also removes another heat producing, moving, shock sensitive component. While there is a cost difference per MB between SSD and HDD, it's getting smaller and smaller. NVME drives allow for smaller, more compact chassis, as well.

I agree.

I remember that, when SSDs first came out, there were concerns that their having a capacity for writes might limit their lives unduly. Many persons chose to install them as second drives.

I'm not saying that the fear was unfounded, but it seems to have been overblown.

Actually hard drive technology has been around since around 1957 with hard drives for PCs being commonplace in the late 1980s.

I have not seen any ATX type motherboards with built in card readers but you can find SATA adapters. I even had an IDE PCMCIA adapter you could install in a floppy slot and use that for a boot device for a special application some years ago. Battery backed XT/PCI RAM disks have been around for a long time.

I agree. But I don't see any reason for Microsoft to mandate the replacement. Over time SSDs will replace HDDs just as HDDs replaced floppies. I still have a HDD in each of my desktop computers because there was no particular reason to throw them away when I added SSDs.

A number of commercial larger computers used to use a boot hardware device.

No logical reason from a moral, business, or technical perspective, correct.

But enough market share to muscle it through, also correct.

See secure boot being mandated for systems running Win10 (? - 8 maybe). That was M$oft, but manufacturers blindly followed suit for a while; some wouldn't even give you the option to turn it off.

Arguably this was once more common, since older CompactFlash can connect directly to PATA, and there were (probably still are, lurking on the shelves of old computer shops and in long-forgotten store rooms) 'adapters' that would let you put a CF card into a PCI slot area, or into a 3.5" bay, or so on, to use as a hard drive. Some 'retro PC' enthusiasts use these to accomodate older systems with BIOSes that can't handle multi-TB drives (because CF cards can still be had in smaller sizes). I believe CompactFlash has moved on to something NVMe-based these days, but I don't know that I've ever seen such an adapter. I've also seen (and own one or two) motherboards that have USB headers designated for Disk-on-Module or DOM (basically just your standard USB header but usually with a standoff post nearby to help secure the module - very similar to how an NVMe mounts mechanically), which is basically just using a thumb drive as a hard drive (and unsurprisingly, all of these boards predate widespread adoption of NVMe). I know 'back in the day' there were PATA DOMs as well, I honestly don't recall if I've seen one for SATA or SAS - usually they're fairly small, plug straight into the PATA headers, and need external power. I don't see any reason you couldn't use one of these to hold /boot or some similar configuration, but I don't recall any of these being very large in capacity (I recall them usually being something like 1-4GB), so putting all of / on that drive may not be feasible depending on distro and so forth.

Windows, being Windows and because they are Windows, use the disk a lot. Too much input output for unknown reasons, or maybe as I said, because they are Windows. Using a HDD for Windows has not been very nice and when you replace the HDD with an SSD you do notice a big difference. Personally, mandatory or not, I wouldn't use Windows with a HDD (or just not use them at all!). Besides, do any new computers come with a HDD these days?

The HDD and SDD approach is "old" school. Both use one storage device to store everything. I would like to suggest a more "out-of-the-box" thinking approach. That is having an SD card reader on the motherboard devoted solely to booting the operating system.

Linux already has the ability to boot from "live" flash drives. Various posts in the thread have alluded to booting a computer independent of the hard drive. Considering that, it would seem "simple", but of course that never is, to move the booting process to an SD card on the motherboard.

When I bought this refurbished Dell Precision T3600 with its 1 TB HDD, I thought of replacing it with an SSD, but changed my mind. If it ain't broke, don't fix it. The slow boot time doesn't bother me.
I did replace the HDDs with SSDs on my laptops (refurbished Thinkpads X200 & T410). What goes into, and runs on, my computers has bugger-all to do with Microsoft.

I still say it'll be a long time before people with requirements for long-term storage of large amounts of data will throw their HDDs away.

Prior to acquiring my new rig at the start of COVID, I had a 6 TB external Seagate desktop "Expansion" drive. Shortly after acquiring the HP, I replaced the Toshie HDD with a 1 TB Crucial MX500.....and ripped the "Barracuda" drive out of its tacky plastic case. It now does duty as a secondary internal drive.

For the large amount of images/videos, etc, which it (mostly) holds, I don't need high-speed access. The "Barracuda" may only be a 5400 rpm drive, but that's plenty fast enough. It'll do me for quite a while yet.

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I have vague recollections of old IBM hard-drive units being removed from a Coventry city centre office block in the early 70s. Darned things were the size of domestic fridges....


Mike.

You probably saw a bank of IBM 2314 disk drives being removed. IBM sold or rented them as a cabinet (called a bank) containing 8 disk drives. The bank had a total storage capacity of about 230 million bytes and rented for about $6,000 a month in pre Viet Nam War U.S. dollars (probably equivalent to somewhere around $45,000 a month in 2022 U.S. dollars).

Each of the eight drives had a removable disk pack consisting of a stack of 10 platters. Data was written on both the upper and lower surfaces of each platter except the bottom surface giving 19 surfaces in each disk pack.

In the shop I managed we only switched disk packs to change operating systems or run payroll. The internal auditors thought that the payroll disk pack was more secure sitting on a shelf rather than spinning on the 2314.