Three main elements determine how fast and effective a drive will be for it's given application. These are Read speed, Write speed and Latency. There are other factors, but these are the easiest to quantify.
Lets take a "typical" SSD vs HDD spec.
#1 7200rpm HDD
150Mbits Read
150Mbits Write
9ms Latency
#2 Mid-range SSD
200Mbits Read
100Mbits Write
0.1ms Latency
Application types.
Gaming
Most modern games take up a lot of space (10GB or so), and require the reading of a mixture of large and small file types. Sustained read is very important, Latency can also be helpful, but write doesn't matter. In my opinion an SSD will be slightly faster overall, but due to cost-per-GB the HDD easily wins.
Video Encoding
So long as your processor is beefy enough, this requires high sequential read and write speeds as well as high storage capacity. Another easy win for HDD's.
Operating System
OS's are booted from hundreds/thousands of very small files. Read and Write speeds are largely unimportant. Low Latency is king and SSD's win easily here. Even once the OS has booted, opening Explorer, Word or just about any other reasonably sized application will be MUCH faster on an SSD.
Conclusion
Until high capacity SSD's become trully affordable, a hybrid solution offers the best practicality and performnace. Use an SSD for you OS booot drive, and HDD's for games and storage.
I personally own 1x Intel X25-M G2 SSD and 3x Samsung F3 HDD's. The SSD contains the OS, MS Office, Photoshop and a few other things. The rest goes on the HDD's. IMHO my SSD has provided the most noticable upgrade I have ever performed on a PC. An OS will easily fit on a 60GB or higher SSD.
As for HDD vs HDD, I would always go for high capacity over ultimate read/write speed. Most 1TB drives are pretty fast and real world Latency is not much beeter on the Velceraptors.
Lets take a "typical" SSD vs HDD spec.
#1 7200rpm HDD
150Mbits Read
150Mbits Write
9ms Latency
#2 Mid-range SSD
200Mbits Read
100Mbits Write
0.1ms Latency
Application types.
Gaming
Most modern games take up a lot of space (10GB or so), and require the reading of a mixture of large and small file types. Sustained read is very important, Latency can also be helpful, but write doesn't matter. In my opinion an SSD will be slightly faster overall, but due to cost-per-GB the HDD easily wins.
Video Encoding
So long as your processor is beefy enough, this requires high sequential read and write speeds as well as high storage capacity. Another easy win for HDD's.
Operating System
OS's are booted from hundreds/thousands of very small files. Read and Write speeds are largely unimportant. Low Latency is king and SSD's win easily here. Even once the OS has booted, opening Explorer, Word or just about any other reasonably sized application will be MUCH faster on an SSD.
Conclusion
Until high capacity SSD's become trully affordable, a hybrid solution offers the best practicality and performnace. Use an SSD for you OS booot drive, and HDD's for games and storage.
I personally own 1x Intel X25-M G2 SSD and 3x Samsung F3 HDD's. The SSD contains the OS, MS Office, Photoshop and a few other things. The rest goes on the HDD's. IMHO my SSD has provided the most noticable upgrade I have ever performed on a PC. An OS will easily fit on a 60GB or higher SSD.
As for HDD vs HDD, I would always go for high capacity over ultimate read/write speed. Most 1TB drives are pretty fast and real world Latency is not much beeter on the Velceraptors.
Last edited:
I've got a 64GB SSD for Windows & Applications and put the games on a Samsung F1 drive which I will replace with the F4 model when it is released.
