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I have a 256gb SSD which has my OS (windows 8) and Office on it. I also have a 4TB USB3.0 external hard drive. I do a fair bit of image and signal analysis using MATLAB. Will there be performance deterioration if I move the MATLAB folder onto the USB3 hard drive?
James
Posted 2016-05-06T01:58:37.343
Reputation: 119
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Yes. There will be significant drop in speed if you move it to external HDD.
SSD are better/faster than HDD for installing operating systems and application software because these software need to access very small but large number of files spread all over the drive. It takes more time for HDD to access these files because the platter has to rotate to get to each of these files.
Also the SATA interface is much faster than USB 3.0 interface.
Performance drops if we switch from SSD to HDD. But even more performance drops when we switch from internal HDD to external HDD.
Manoj
Posted 2016-05-06T01:58:37.343
Reputation: 642
Thanks. Will it influence only the startup time or also running time? – James – 2016-05-06T02:58:15.703
@James: Whenever you are accessing the disk. We don't know your workflow, so we don't know whether you load all your data into memory upfront. Running MATLAB scripts (many functions in the standard MATLAB library are implemented as scripts) will also hit the disk -- definitely recommended to keep those on the SSD, as they don't take much space. – Ben Voigt – 2016-05-06T02:59:46.453
The incompleteness of the original questions asks for more explanation, not for a theoretical answer that doesn't really take into account the specific situation of the OP. MATLAB will be slower, but depending on the workflow of the OP this could be somewhere between 0.01 percent slower and more than 100 percent slower. – BramMooij – 2016-10-10T12:21:00.360
This question can only be answered properly if we take your workflow into account. Therefore, could you expand on what sort of codes you might be running. Some background: If you apply many different small operations the SSD might affect performance significantly. It will as well when you're writing lots of data to the hard drive. However, if you have long calculations that in the end result in small data files, the will be no noticeable effect. – BramMooij – 2016-10-10T12:18:57.810