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What's the bird's eye view of running a specific application from an SSD for improved i/o
in comparison to a standard hard drive?
Would this help with browser speed?
The list of applications which could benefit from faster storage is vast.[3]
As part of their designs, SSDs offer much bigger levels of parallelism for I/O operations, so it is preferable to leave scheduling decisions to their internal logic – especially for high-end SSDs.[188][189]
Or, perhaps, just swap
and temporary files? Withough getting too deep into the nitty-gritty is this feasible and what might the extent of performance gain be?
While it's true that they offer objectively better performance than your typical 7.2k HDD (due to not having any seek latency for a start), I think how much better it is can vary a lot between systems (and be partly perceptual). If you want benchmarks, various review sites already have plenty of those. – user1686 – 2019-01-07T06:59:42.053
2SSDs are generally very much faster than HDDs - they don't need to seek, and they read and write much faster. So anything which does a lot of disk access (such as a database server which has too much data to store all of it in memory) will benefit massively from being on an SSD. But you already know that. I don't see how we can provide you with a more bird's eye view than that. – l0b0 – 2019-01-07T07:00:26.483
Not overly concerned about database server performance so much as browser performance as per the title. Seems sufficiently specific, but, of course, I'm biased. – Thufir – 2019-01-07T07:06:22.083
2It depends a lot on the amount of RAM you already have, since Linux caches files in memory. And the browser performance is rather dependent on the global performance of the network stack. – xenoid – 2019-01-07T08:01:06.847