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Confusion over SSD

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It seems to me that there is a huge advantage to an SSD as an OS/Progam disk Latency, Read/Writes fantastic and probably would make booting and opening of programs a pleasure.........but what I find confusing is everyone suggests and SSD as OS/Program only and to have files of all other types on a HDD which to me basicly creates a Hybrid drive scenario with initial boot fast and wonderful but then faced with opening and saving work files to a traditional HDD to find our Latency, Read/Writes, Iops and all right back to where we started considering after Boot and Opening progams sure saves a few seconds but then all is lost when opening and saving our Drawing Files, Photoshop Files, Music, Video onto a traditional HDD at those drives Latency, Read/Write, IOPS capabilities.

Now for all the experienced people out there.......is my perception wrong on this considering even in the old days with just HDD a little time is spent booting and opening programs and the balance of time is spent opeing files working on them and then saving them....of course I am refering to a working Cad/Cam Photoshop or any other work base not just games where our work is money not pleasure.

So simply put is my perception wrong would it not be better to have a SSD for a OS/Program drive then a slightly larger SSD for a working Storage to keep files under work until complete then have a third HDD drive set for final storage.

Any Thoughts on the SSD quickness being lost in using HDD for file storage

More about : confusion ssd

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So the advantages of SSD as boot or applications device makes a lot of sense as you will experience all around better system responsiveness-everything just happens faster because the OS responds faster.
Having a Data drive is important for all those hundreds of MP3s and pictures, and other assorted files because real estate on a SSD is very precious. You'll want to put Office apps, browsers, email and chat clients, your current favorite games, CS5 or other media type apps all on the SSD. Save larger files and backups etc on the data drive.

buzznut said:
So the advantages of SSD as boot or applications device makes a lot of sense as you will experience all around better system responsiveness-everything just happens faster because the OS responds faster.
Having a Data drive is important for all those hundreds of MP3s and pictures, and other assorted files because real estate on a SSD is very precious. You'll want to put Office apps, browsers, email and chat clients, your current favorite games, CS5 or other media type apps all on the SSD. Save larger files and backups etc on the data drive.



Thanks Buzznut

I agree the real estate is pricy but time is worth something too, reminds me when I started with CNC controls 25+ yrs ago they had then Bubble Memory basicly a Nand memory module but they couldn't break the 50KB barrier at a reasonable cost, they went to HDD for a While and now back to Flash .... it seems Seagate is pushing a Hybrid Drive basicly the same scenario so the Z68 platform with HDD and SSD cashing to keep the market going in both the SSD and HDD markets keeping prices up in both arenas.

Kind of reminds me of the days Ram was controlled like a comodity and traded arificialy keeping prices high so all us poor Puter users suffered with 256KB ram because Ram was the priciest aspect of the computer at them time..........Gotta love the marketing genious's

Thanks for your time Buzznut

actually, SSD prices are finally starting to hit the $1 per gigabyte range. They've been coming down steadily over the last 3 years, but now may be a good time to invest in one, as the HD market is rising abruptly because of flooding in Asia.

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bob_83 said:
after Boot and Opening progams sure saves a few seconds but then all is lost when opening and saving our Drawing Files, Photoshop Files, Music, Video onto a traditional HDD at those drives Latency, Read/Write, IOPS capabilities.
The OS is a really good fit for an SSD because it contains LOTS of fairly small files that have to be accessed to boot your system or start most programs. Lots of little files = random I/O activity, and since SSDs have very fast access times they do this sort of thing really well.

But when you get into data files you're generally talking about relatively fewer files that tend to be accessed one after another rather then all at once. Very few people try to open up 100 documents all at once. When you're accessing a relatively small number of files and especially if those files are large, then you're doing a lot less random I/O and therefore you're not really capitalizing on the strengths of an SSD. And of course, as Buzznut mentioned, data files often take a lot more storage which costs quite a premium with SSDs.

Now there are some kinds of workloads that do a lot of random I/O with data files. For example if you're doing a lot of batch processing of image files, or if you're doing non-linear video editing, your workload may benefit from an SSD. So it pays to understand how your work affects the system in order to choose the right hardware to optimize it.

But as a general rule for the average guy who doesn't want to spend time running Perfmon to figure out what's going on under the covers, the adage "SSD for the OS and hard drives for data" works pretty well most of time.
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