How does running from a different drive works/affects performance?

Question

I have a new PC with an SSD drive and an HDD drive, with Windows OS on the SSD. The SSD is small so I am putting there only what really needs to be there. If I install a program on the HDD, when I run it, how does it affect the performance of the program? Does it makes a difference if it runs from the SSD or the HDD?

Answer 1

Installing an app on an SSD, as opposed to an HDD, definitely has performance bonuses. The question is: By how much?

The answer to that question is directly dependent on this question: How much the program reads from and writes to disk?

• Most small apps that consist of an executable and a dozen of DLLs only benefit from faster startup because they load their entire self to memory and ignore the storage volume for the rest of their life unless they save some documents to disk, in which case the saving is faster on an SSD.
• Video games and complex apps like Photoshop and CATIA benefit a lot from being installed onto an SSD because they frequently access the disk after launch.

Bonus info:

Once an app is loaded onto memory, it won't stay there. Windows performs something called paging: It moves parts of the virtual memory between the disk and the memory. So if you place your page file on an SSD instead of HDD, you will have performance benefits. Of course, if you don't know what a page file is, there is good chance that you need to do nothing. Windows loves to store page files on SSDs.