OSX talks to the HD way to much?

I'd like to get some insight from the community on this problem. I've been having an issue with my MacBook Pro (model 13" early 2011). Every time I did anything I would get a pinwheel. Just logging in after a bootup would take me about 5 minutes. Whenever I clicked on anything I'd get a pinwheel for about a minute or 2. I was also running Windows using bootcamp. Windows ran fine. I didn't experience any lag or problems while using windows (windows 10 tech preview).

With that said I reformatted the OSX partition and did a clean install of OSX (yosemite). The problem still remained and windows still ran without a hitch. At this point I'm thinking it's a hardware issue. So I replace the SSD and still the same pinwheel problem. I then found out that the sata cable tends to go bad on these Macs which cause excessive read/write errors on the harddrive. I replaced the cable and everything is fine now.

My question is, if the Mac was having issues talking to the SSD, why did it only affect OSX and not windows? they are both sitting on the exact same drive and running through the same faulty cable. Is windows better equip to handle such failures? Is OSX constantly talking to the Harddrive way more than Windows is?