The Best of Both Worlds: An SSD and a HDD

Patrick Couzens asked about using both a solid state drive (SSD) and a tough disk drive (HDD) in the same computer.

I think this can be an excellent plan. It provides you most of the speed benefits of an SSD while not the constricted space.

Because it's no moving elements, an SSD performs a lot of faster than a tough drive. however you pay a heavy worth for that--literally. As I write this, you'll buy a 1TB internal onerous drive for fewer than $100. you can't buy a 64GB SSD for that small.

However, if you retain your data files (what Windows 7 calls libraries) on your onerous drive, and put Windows and your applications on a way smaller capacity SSD, you'll likely gain most of the advantages of an SSD without losing the massive storage capacities of today's onerous drives.

I did some casual benchmarking to work out how much of a profit an SSD would provide you with during this state of affairs. Eight tasks took 220 seconds using only a Seagate Barracuda 7200 exhausting drive, but only 129 seconds using only Kingston Technology SSDNow 100 SSD. that's an improvement of simply over forty one percent.

But when I used the SSD as my system drive, and also the exhausting drive for knowledge, it did almost furthermore, finishing the tasks in 134 seconds. that's 39 percent faster than the exhausting drive by itself, and only 4 percent slower than the SSD by itself.

I have to admit it: I didn't expect that abundant of an improvement. Your numbers may vary.

How huge an SSD do you need? once more, your numbers may vary, but my very own system partition--including all of my put in applications but no data--could fit on a 64GB drive with lots of area to spare.

Even for systems with just one drive, i like to recommend using separate system and information partitions. See Move Your information to a Safer, Separate Partition, Part 1: XP, part 2: Vista, or the Windows 7 version for instructions on fitting Windows for this type of use.