I’ve just installed a 240GB SSD into my laptop, and I have a ~1TB conventional drive also installed.
What should I install on and store on which.
I know the operating system belongs on the SSD, but other than that I’m not sure.
SSDs do best with large files that require frequent loads into memory. Video games are a big one. I think video files also do well on SSDs, but I’m not certain. Music and text documents probably won’t benefit much, neither will something like Microsoft Word unless you’re really opening and closing it all the time.
I’d disagree slightly. I’d put any software that you regularly use on the SSD. If you do, for example, Word and Excel will take less than a second to open, vs 5-10 seconds if you keep them on the old hard drive. In my opinion that’s one of the unmeasurable but important benefits of a SSD: everything just opens the instant you click. You’ll never wait for a program that’s stalled out while trying to read a bunch of scattered install files. It’s not so important for your documents to be on the SSD since they’re small and not frequently accessed. But since they’re small, why not?
Games, definitely put on the SSD. Any software really.
Big media files like video won’t benefit at all from faster access times. Conventional hard drives are already more than fast enough to keep up with high definition video data rates. Though if you do any video editing, that will benefit tremendously if you work from the SSD.
IME, 240 gb is plenty big enough for everything except large media collections. You should have no problem fitting the OS, all of your software, several video games, a big collection of documents, a fair number of photos, etc. You just won’t be able to fit your 500 gb collection of [del]porn[/del] historical public domain movies.
What do you use the most?
I’m running a 120Gb SSD. Just the OS, Firefox, Thunderbird and a few games that I play online that benefit from having fast-loading maps (Battlefield 3 especially). Other than that it all goes onto the normal HDD.
Program files on SSD, media files on the HDD. Unless you have really a lot of program files, in which case sort by which ones you care about opening fast.