What's the point of having both a hard drive and a SSD?

[snormy]

I'm in the process of buying parts for a new gaming rig. I was looking in the "new builds" forum of this site and someone was helping another person pick out parts for his gaming rig with a budget range of $1300-1500. He linked these parts: http://pcpartpicker.com/p/qIMW.

I noticed that there was both a 1TB 3.5" 7200RPM hard drive and a 120GB 2.5" SSD. I was wondering, what's the point of having both of them?

 

[MC_K7]

SSD are much faster than standard mechanical drives, but they're more expensive and have limited space. For instance, a 120 GB SSD costs more than a 1 TB mechanical drive, in other words the cost per GB is much higher for SSD.

In this situation you would install your OS and software on the SSD to gain performance, and use the secondary mechanical drive to store your data (pictures, movies, music, etc...).

Unless 120 GB is enough for you, then you wouldn't need a secondary drive, but for most people 120 GB is not enough. There are also SSD with more space, 256 GB, 512 GB, and even 768 GB but they're much more expensive of course.

 

[the great randini]

ssd's are much faster and ideal for os. but they are much more expesive (price per Gb .50 cents and up).
so the theory here is that you install the os on the ssd and your favorite games or things you want to be as fast as possible, and then you backup your data and all other data goes to the standard hdd

 

[smorizio]

I'm in the process of buying parts for a new gaming rig. I was looking in the "new builds" forum of this site and someone was helping another person pick out parts for his gaming rig with a budget range of $1300-1500. He linked these parts: http://pcpartpicker.com/p/qIMW.

I noticed that there was both a 1TB 3.5" 7200RPM hard drive and a 120GB 2.5" SSD. I was wondering, what's the point of having both of them?

snormy i have my i5 rig set up with and intel 520 ssd as the boot drive and a 500g data drive. with the ssd on the 6g port and with my asus saberthooth mb my cold boot from off to into windows 8 is 15 sec. from sleep to on is no delay other then waiting for the screen to wake up. games and main program open real fast. the old platter drive there a limit to how fast it can read and write data off the platters. the newer ssd dont have that bottleneck. the down side with a ssd is how many writes the ssd memory can use and how good the ssd firmware is and the vendor that build the drives. ssd still growing tech there still a lot of drives that brick or have a lot of windows blue screen. if you stay with standard intel or the 830 or main brand of ssd and not a rebranded ssd most times you wont have any issues.

 

[johnbl]

SSD provides speed, the Hard drive provides cheap bulk storage.
I would install the OS and key games on the SSD, use the HHD for media storage or to swap out games to when you run out of space on the SSD. Many of my newer builds just don't use a internal hard drive any more. Too high failure rate, heat and power cost.

 

[snormy]

Ok, I understand now. Thanks for explaining it to me guys.