Question saving location

[sussertown]

Does it make sense to put the os on an ssd and saving files created on an HDD?

 

[Tech Junky]

If you have a small SSD capacity and/or huge files like movies that are 5GB in size. Most NAS devices use spinners for capacity and if done right you can get near SSD speeds by putting them into a Raid0 or 10. I have a 4 x 8TB R10 setup and it gets 400MB/s or more for speed.

 

[sussertown]

will putting office files and music files on an HHD slow things down? I may be able to add a 2nd ssd. I'm getting a new machine and my old one has an ssd I could use.

 

[Tech Junky]

music is small / fine
office can be slow if you're working with huge Visio / Access type files

 

[sussertown]

I'm just talking about simple burned songs and word and publisher documents. nothing more fancy. Will this slow opening of word docs?

 

[BonzaiDuck]

I always buy into new technologies a year or too late after they first appeared. The first SATA SSDs I had were small, or I remember paying close to $500 for a 500GB Samsung. I think, a year after I built it in 2011, I swapped an HDD boot drive for that pricey SSD.

I always understood that there is a pyramidal model of computer architecture. For "storage", CPU registers are extremely fast, but have a very small capacity. Dropping down to another step, RAM has much greater but limited size; yet it is slower than the registers. The bottleneck has always been persistent storage, but NVME drives and Optane have changed that equation. Do you need to swap out disks? I'm not sure there is a hot-swap option for NVME cards.

So every time I build a computer (these days), I plan on a mix of storage. I think I've decided to drop the use of SATA SSDs in that strategy, but I still look for a couple high-capacity HDDs, lean toward a large amount of RAM, and install more than one NVME drive.

For audio and video files, HDDs are just fine. They're also just fine for persistent backup media. I don't even look for the fastest anymore. I now prefer to use 2.5" HDDs in my desktops, since they weigh less. I don't care if they only spin at 5,400 rpm, because they can be cached to NVME or RAM. And you don't even need to do that with audio and video files.

There was a time when building a PC when I and others would split hairs over the expense of HDDs, SSDs and other components. A year or two later, one would feel regret for having got a 250GB SSD, wishing one had initially purchased a 500 or 1TB unit. Now, prices seem inconsequential. Regardless the price per gigabyte among the options, I might pick up a few NVMEs and a few 2.5" 4TB spinners. With the spinners, having a couple spares can be useful with a proper 5.25" hot-swap bay device.

Even if the money seems to be a lesser factor these days, I'm mindful of the price for a 4TB NVME versus that for a 2.5" 4TB spinner. On a shoestring budget, I could learn to live with less than I do, and the essential ingredient in all cases is a 1TB NVME boot drive. However, experience has taught me that having local backup for the boot disk and everything else is a life-saver. So I insist on having a hot-swappable HDD for that purpose. You can put your video and audio files on either type of drive.

 

[sussertown]

thanks to all