I can confirm that fully moving Windows from a HDD to an SSD makes all the difference in the world; for some reason, W10 and especially W11 are astoundingly slow on hard disks.

I have a W11 VM, and if I run it on a SATA SSD it boots up in ~30s; HDD, the same image on a HDD takes approximately 5 minutes to get to the login screen, then no less than 2 minutes to run applications.
Even considering that I disabled paging files.