What types of files benefit from an SSD?

MSI laptop has mechanical and several SSDs. Clearly the OS and programs like web browsers, games, Office apps, etc benefit from SSD storage since they load much faster. What about other types of files? Is there any benefit to putting videos, music, pictures, Excel spreadsheets, etc on an SSD? What I am considering doing is putting the videos on the mechanical drive (due to very large sized DVD's) and everything else on SSD's.

It depends on the SSD

Typically when you have medium sized files (1mb or above) and need to randomly access them, or you have large files and you need to copy/read them quickly - this is where SSDs excel. Optane SSDs handle small file access quickly, so lots of small files or small writes quickly.

If you just watch the videos there is absolutely no point in putting them on an SSD. If you're editing that's another thing entirely.

I would not even put pictures on an SSD, again unless you're working with huge RAW or lossless images. But <2MB jpgs won't benefit from an SSD noticeably.
Same goes for music. If you're talking MP3s no point in putting those on SSD, if you have WAV and lossless files then it will be clearly faster to seek and load them from an SSD.

As for games it depends entirely on the game itself, so guess you have to try each of them. Many benefit almost nothing from being on an SSD, but for some it cuts the loading time by 90%.

Spreadsheets and other office files are small, unless you work with hundred meg publisher documents, again nothing to gain by putting them on an SSD.


But on a global level, if you have every file on an SSD searching them would be 50x faster, you know how often you search for files on your drives, and if it's worth the extra investment.

Kick those hot noisy slow spinners to the curb.

Digital static storage is the future.

Shifting & Using - SSD
Lumping & Dumping - HDD (especially dumping long term probably)

Updating metadata (tags) on lots of music files at once is pretty painful on a HDD. Well, once you’ve gotten used to doing it on an SSD (of any kind)

M76 said:

Same goes for music. If you're talking MP3s no point in putting those on SSD

Click to expand...

Music is a different animal than most data. Music is broken up into seperate files, and often people listen to music on "random" as opposed to listening straight through. Plus is has to read the metadata, plus the album art, and start streaming all at the same time when the user hits play. Whether it's a 5MB MP3 or a 30MB FLAC, the action is the same. All that moving around causes slight delays when coming off a HDD. It's subtle, but with music you're more prone to noticing gaps. Where as a movie or picture, you expect a slight delay in the begining and then it's good for a while.

And then as I mentioned above, once you start making tag changes, it's much more noticeable of a difference.

westrock2000 said:

Music is a different animal than most data. Music is broken up into seperate files, and often people listen to music on "random" as opposed to listening straight through. Plus is has to read the metadata, plus the album art, and start streaming all at the same time when the user hits play. Whether it's a 5MB MP3 or a 30MB FLAC, the action is the same. All that moving around causes slight delays when coming off a HDD. It's subtle, but with music you're more prone to noticing gaps. Where as a movie or picture, you expect a slight delay in the begining and then it's good for a while.

And then as I mentioned above, once you start making tag changes, it's much more noticeable of a difference.

Click to expand...

Meh, reading a mp3/aac/etc. music file is largely sequential, and each file is generally only accessed every few minutes (i.e., the read heads aren't scurrying all over the platters), so the benefits of a SSD are somewhat muted. Any half-decent player will preload and start caching the next song and its metadata before the current one ends, and most also have a cross-fade option that further negates the issue. And if you're redoing your tags so often that having the files on a HDD is an issue, you're probably doing something wrong.

I have all my music sitting on a NAS running HDDs (RAIDz2), so any possible delays are further magnified. Never had an issue with access times, latency, etc. using various players (Logitech Squeezebox, iTunes, Linux players, etc.).

M76 said:

But on a global level, if you have every file on an SSD searching them would be 50x faster, you know how often you search for files on your drives, and if it's worth the extra investment.

Click to expand...

Sorry to keep quoting you, I do it lovingly

On Windows 10, the indexing option is amazing for HDD. I have it enabled on a music drive with 5TB of music and the little search in the top right of Windows Explorer is super fast. Plus the indexing will even search documents and music tags. Makes searching 330,000+ songs a breeze. I had to explicitly turn it on for an entire drive though in Indexing Options.

westrock2000 said:

Music is a different animal than most data. Music is broken up into seperate files, and often people listen to music on "random" as opposed to listening straight through. Plus is has to read the metadata, plus the album art, and start streaming all at the same time when the user hits play. Whether it's a 5MB MP3 or a 30MB FLAC, the action is the same. All that moving around causes slight delays when coming off a HDD. It's subtle, but with music you're more prone to noticing gaps. Where as a movie or picture, you expect a slight delay in the begining and then it's good for a while.

And then as I mentioned above, once you start making tag changes, it's much more noticeable of a difference.

Click to expand...

Last time I bothered with metadata was in the nineties. So I didn't even consider it.
Random or straight trough doesn't really matter if the songs are broken up in to files. Or do you mean people listening to 10 seconds from this song and 10 seconds from that? Anyhow starting to play an MP3 will likely put the entire file into read cache anyway. Either way I never seen any delay in playing random songs from a HDD even in the olden days of PII and PIII computers.

westrock2000 said:

Sorry to keep quoting you, I do it lovingly

On Windows 10, the indexing option is amazing for HDD. I have it enabled on a music drive with 5TB of music and the little search in the top right of Windows Explorer is super fast. Plus the indexing will even search documents and music tags. Makes searching 330,000+ songs a breeze. I had to explicitly turn it on for an entire drive though in Indexing Options.

Click to expand...

Indexing helps hdds but then again it is the indexing that will be slow then Sure it works for a HDD full of static files, but on a drive where you regularly work, it will be messy.