I am going to give my laptop a kick by adding an SSD as the primary drive, relegating the 500Gb 5400 to bulk storage duties.
The big difference between available SSDs, as far as I can tell, are the random r/w IOPS, but how do these relate to real world performance and how much should I care when comparing prices? 10k vs. 60k vs 90k say.
The other noticeable difference is power - some are ~2W, others 0.1W. Again there's not a huge price difference, so is that 200x power difference a significant performance/reliability factor?
p.s. I guess I should install the OS, games, programmes on the SSD, but music and photos and seldom accessed files can stay on the HDD, ... does that sounds about right?
Real world performance sees little noticeable difference. Unless you have a very fast stopwatch or a lot of file operations and time to kill.
SSD's use half the power or less than the best HD drive, so it's a matter of how minutely green you want your laptop to be. They also run a lot cooler. And silent. And are around 10x lighter.
Yes, install static files (the OS) games where load-time matters, etc. on the SSD and put your documents, hibernate file, swap file (if needed - remember RAM is cheap) and your other data on the 500GB drive (and your backup location :) )
There's been some great SSD deals in recent weeks. You can pick up a SAMSUNG 840 EVO 120GB on Amazon for £70.
Basically there's no reason not to get an SSD asap as the most critical update for any PC for a massive speed boost.
Even if your GPU isn't the fastest and your frame rates are not high, with an SSD you can be in game and onto your third kill while the HD guys are still loading the map...
Yeah, just buy yourself one from a reasonable brand with some good reviews. I'd avoid the 20k ones just based on the reviews I read, mine is about 50k and I've got absolutely no complaints.
Thanks for the tips. Samsung 840 does seem to get a lot of mentions.
Does putting the hibernate file on the HDD not mean that waking from hibernate (not that I do that often...) is, relatively, slow?