This is one of my biggest pet-peeves. Whenever I have to help people debug performance issues with their machines it's almost always due to a bottleneck on their disk.
For my family members that have laptops with those shitty 5400rpm HDDs with 8MB read/write buffers - I can't blame them and just tell them to upgrade to an SSD. I've witnessed Windows update hogging 100% of the disk activity for 30+ minutes after reboot on these machines until they're actually usable...
But for my developer friends who I figure should know better, they never seem to think of looking into disk activity. It's almost always things like applications hanging/blocking on disk due to lots of different processes trying to read/write at the same time on an HDD or "small" RAM size causing constant thrashing on a disk due to memory being paged in and out of swap constantly.
For my family members that have laptops with those shitty 5400rpm HDDs with 8MB read/write buffers - I can't blame them and just tell them to upgrade to an SSD. I've witnessed Windows update hogging 100% of the disk activity for 30+ minutes after reboot on these machines until they're actually usable...
But for my developer friends who I figure should know better, they never seem to think of looking into disk activity. It's almost always things like applications hanging/blocking on disk due to lots of different processes trying to read/write at the same time on an HDD or "small" RAM size causing constant thrashing on a disk due to memory being paged in and out of swap constantly.