<p>Microsoft is forcing PC manufacturers to make significant changes for the next year. Apparently, the company wants new computers to only be shipped with SSD (solid-state) boot drives instead of spinning drives by 2023.</p>
<p><img class="alignnone size-full wp-image-2938" src="https://www.wincert.net/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/hard-disk-drive.jpg" alt="7GB of disk space" width="640" height="426" /></p>
<p>OEMs (Original Equipment Manufacturers) are bewildered by the request from the Redmond giant as they&#8217;re fearing this change might raise the costs of machines that were aimed at budget-conscious customers.</p>
<p>It&#8217;s a fact that these days SSD drives have become the standard for most laptops and computers today. Even many mid-range PCs now ship with SSD drives because of superior performance compared to spinning drives.</p>
<p>Even though PC manufacturers might sometimes go with spinning drives, thus offering more capacity at a lower price, Microsoft wants Windows to run on SSDs which results in much better performance and user experience.</p>
<p>Microsoft still allows you to install Windows 11 on a spinning drive and that probably won&#8217;t change in 2023. Windows 11 will perfectly run on a spinning drive since only two Windows 11 features require SSD and that&#8217;s DirectStorage and Windows Subsystem for Android.</p>
<p>PC manufacturers are concerned that low-cost devices could become useless with the proposed change.</p>
<p>These days new laptops that are offering spinning drives are mostly equipped with 1TB drives. Moving to SSDs would result in a higher price and less storage in the 128-256GB range. Most PC manufacturers think that this is not sufficient for most consumers anymore.</p>
<p>Despite SSDs getting cheaper while offering more disk space, spinning hard drives still offer an advantage when it comes to value as they&#8217;re still the preferred choice when there&#8217;s a need to store a lot of videos, images, and other large files.</p>