On 2014-11-19 03:24:45 +0000, Eric Stevens said:

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/11/07/storage_ssds/

... Unless your workload is very specifically single source, massive
capture, then you should be running SSDs. Even if you are not running
pure SSD, the case for tiered or hybrid storage makes itself.

SSDs are faster. They have way lower latency. They consume less power.
They take up less space.

With the OS and application software, plus home directory as well as
any active work files on the SSD and everything else on spinning rust I
have achieved storage nirvana. At least, until SSDs are so huge and
cheap that I can put everything onto one.

My current online storage needs are about 3TB, and it's too expensive
for me to put that all on SSDs. This sort of stuff gets cheaper all
the time so I can wait.

Recently I took the optical drive out of my wife's old Macbook (white
unibody, the "last macbook") and replaced it with an SSD as well as
cranking the RAM. Installed the latest OS X on the SSD and now she has
the same kind of SSD for active OS and files, and spinning rust for
storage that I do. She loves it and as her hard drive is set to
auto-sleep, she has found that her battery life increased by about a
third!

I see no benefit to those new-fangled "hybrid" drives (really just a HD
with a bigger, smarter cache) because the rust will still be spinning
all the time.