Which programs should or not go on SSD ?

To add to foscooter's comments:

I would put any program that YOU want to start up quickly on your SSD. If your SSD starts to run out of space - you can install games on your secondary HDD to free up space.

Basically what you want on your SSD is:

Whatever programs/games you use MOST

Antivirus

Office programs

Web browsers.

Drivers automatically go your SSD due to the OS installation. You cannot have a driver located on another drive.

Have to agree with putting all your programs on the SSD. I have Windows and all my programs and games ( 8-10 games ) on my 120GB Vertex 2 and I have about 30GB of free space. I do have to uninstall games I am done with before I install new ones but that is as easy as can be with Steam.

I do not store anything on the SSD. All pictures, music and video go on my storage drives. Even Excel and Word files go on the storage and backup drives.

Agree with all above, SSD for OS/programs, HDD for library storage. Plus I would recommend getting SSDTweaker its a great little program for tweaking SSD settings.

Fungi

Let me reverse the question.
What should you NOT put on a SSD? Particularly a largish 120gb SSD.

Do not put video files which can be huge.
Put backups on the hard drive.
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Otherwise,
Put everything else on the ssd.
When the SSD starts to get full, analyze what is taking space, and consider moving it off to a hard drive.

I thought the idea was to avoid having programs that do a lot of writing yet have little benefit. That's why you eliminate the page file. Ideally, lots of reads with few writes. Office on the SDD and the docs and xls on the HDD.

In the SSD mega thread, they suggest putting users/me/MyEverything on the HDD. And change the normal install location to the HDD. That's what instigated this thread.

But if everyone is installing applications on the SSD, that's good to know.

You don't do much writes on the SSD anyways once everything is installed. It's the reads you reallly want with SSDs. Thats why it's good to install the programs you need (or want) to start quick. Obviously taking the page file would help greatly at reducing writes on the SSD as well. However there can be instances where people might want to use their SSD just as a "scratch" disk for photoshop/HD movie editing.

Most programs give the option to save in a different location as well.

It's also a good idea to at least keep 10% of your SSD's space free - as the SSD fills up near the max, reads and writes would be dramatically reduced.

The theoretical reason for avoiding writes is to preserve the nand chips. They have a limited number of lifetime writes.
The practical reason to use a ssd for writes is that writes happen faster on a ssd. In practice, normal desktop users will not do enough writes per day to limit the life of the ssd.
You can expect that the ssd will be obsolete for many years before there is a write problem.

Best answer selected by eXistenZ.