Can confirm, had a huge "WTF?" on installing Win8 on an HDD and seeing the friggin' OS UI pause constantly for no obvious reason. It was like running Win98 on a 75Mhz Pentium with 16MB of RAM. On my beefy quad-core Intel with 16GB of RAM. Added an SSD, problem went away. They're relying on the SSD to make up for some really lazy crap in their code.