What are the best ways to make use of my SSD's extra capacity? [closed]

Question

I recently bought a new SSD to replace an old one with less capacity. Previously I'd only used the old SSD as a boot/Program Files drive, but only half of the new SSD is taken up by the C:\ partition, and I want to make the absolute most of the remaining space - i.e. move data to the drive that will most benefit from SSD speeds.

With this in mind, I'm considering transferring the movies and TV shows on my data drive (a standard HDD) to the SSD. To what extent will this actually improve the experience of watching my movies compared to watching them on a HDD? Are there potential bottlenecks when doing so that SSDs would surpass?

Are there any other potential applications that would benefit from the performance advantages of an SSD?

Answer 1

Moving movies will have little impact on playing regular movies unless you are finding long waits when skipping forward and back - this is because the read speed of a hard drive is fast enough to keep up with most videos. In the case of high res, uncompressed videos, you would find an SSD is faster.

While SSD's are much faster then hard drives (about 5 times the write speed), where they really shine is random read/writes (ie lots of small requests scattered across the disk), because they don't need to wait for heads to rotate to the appropriate position on a platter. Thus small files and virtual disk / scratch areas will give you the most noticeable speed increase.

One thing to bear in mind is that SSD's can only be written to a limited number of times. Unused disk is used seamlessly and invisibly by the SSD to spread the writes across more of the disk, resulting in greater longevity (but this is probably not a major concern if you are only doing occasional writes)

Answer 2

You will not notice the difference when playing a movie from HDD compared to from SSD.

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