Is running streaming radio from the web browser using the hard drive? I don’t want to put unecessary strain on the SSD.
This is a sure way to make yourself crazy.
You can’t use a computer that you think is “fragile” - if you are worried about wearing out your SSD, then you shouldn’t use one.
That said, just fire up whatever the Windows equivalent of “Activity Monitor” is on OS X - it will show you drive reads/writes, and watch it while you stream your music. I doubt it buffers to disc, unless you are very short of RAM.
As beowulf notes, the real issue is where the audio player is buffering to.
My first thought is that it is using the OS’s page file (virtual memory). If so, there are ways of setting that so that paging occurs on whatever hard drive you have in your system. It sort of defeats the purpose of having an SSD (or at least one of them), but I’ve done it with reasonably good results.
Hopefully someone will come along to this thread who had a good idea of how most programs handle buffering and we can proceed from there.
Individual programs do not choose to use or not use virtual memory/the paging file. Programs allocate memory. The operating system does its best to allocate that memory out of RAM. It only starts using the paging file if it runs out of RAM.
Anyway, I seriously wouldn’t worry about it. Modern SSDs are good for something like hundreds of thousands of write cycles per cell. Standard desktop usage isn’t going to come close to wearing out an SSD in an unreasonably short timeframe.