[Kenji]

The reason why spinning disks still stick around is not just because of the price. Often, it is the case that you do not need 200-500MBit/s and ~100+ are enough. I have my OS on a (small) SSD and my spinning disks filled with my documents, music, movies. All of this does not need high speed, so it would be wasted money to buy an SSD for it. I'd rather buy twice the storage and do RAID1 (which I did).

[id]

It's still the price in a way. If they would cost the same, you would choose the SSD.

[13of40]

It's a mystery to me that hybrid SSD+HD drives aren't more ubiquitous. I can guess what data is going to be read off the drive more frequently, but the computer can collect statistics and make a way more accurate prediction than I can.

[mrob]

I don't think statistics will make better predictions than I can. For example, consider a moderately large file (eg. 100MB), which is only ever read occasionally, by sequential low speed streaming. It seems reasonable to place it on the HD, but it's music, and I want it on the SSD so I can have the HD powered down for lower background noise when I'm listening to it. And I could have another almost identical file which is a podcast instead, and that should go on the HD because I don't care about minimum background noise when listening to podcasts, so even looking at the file type won't help. The correct place for a file depends on what you intend to do with it, not any measurable property.

[13of40]

I'd assert that it could make a better prediction for the majority of the files stored on your drive. For example, even if it was technically feasable to do with separate drives, do you know which files in the global assembly cache should go on SSD versus HD? Which pieces of your registry hive files? Which bits of your browser cache?

[mrob]

I don't use Windows so I don't have GAC or registry files. Browser cache always goes on the SSD because it's highly latency sensitive.

[Kenji]

You say browser cache always goes on the SSD (I do that too, whenever there's no configuration to put it into RAM, which I prefer). Aren't you concerned about wear? If you stream high resolution video files from, say, youtube or twitch, you write gigabyte after gigabyte into that SSD.

[mrob]

Modern SSDs will survive hundreds of TBs of writes, sometimes even PBs. Techreport did a long endurance test with multiple drives:

http://techreport.com/review/27909/the-ssd-endurance-experim... "All of the drives surpassed their official endurance specifications by writing hundreds of terabytes without issue."

I expect to upgrade for increased capacity long before I reach that.