bystander :
An SSD does make booting and loading a lot faster. Using systems without an SSD feels very sluggish to get things done. The GPU will give you more FPS in games, making them more enjoyable to play.
I don't think one needs to think about this very long as an either / or situation...as we are talking about a potential impact measured in seconds per day versus one in hours per day. It's all about perspective ... and what people notice. If you give to sets of folks the same picture to comment on, one group saying "I like this picture what do you think" and the other group, "what's wrong with this picture ?", it's a safe bet that the 2nd group will find the anomaly much more often than the first. So if your approach is "let me see if i can tell the difference" ... versus ... "will anyone notice if i change this ?", you will get two very different sets of results. You might find this data interesting.
Over 6 weeks, 5 users used the same desktop machine equipped with (2) SSDs, (2) SSHDs and (1) 7200 rpm HD. Each night the machine was reconfigured to boot off and run the same programs / games off a different device. In one instance, one user noted that the boot time "seemed slower than yesterday" when he was moved from SSD to HD boot. The other times, same user didn't notice anything. No user reported any difference in application or gaming performance.
Test was repeated with otherwise identical laptops ... one with SSD + HD and one with SSHD only ... again no one noted any differences in application or gaming performance. Sure you can run a benchmark and prove how much faster a SSD is ... or you can choose a task and stare at the screen (perhaps with a stopwatch even) and note the difference. But in everyday use, people don't do that and that allows the "bottleneck" to enter the equation... that bottleneck is usually the user who after launching an app is looking at the hard copy of what he / she wants to edit with that application ... whether the app took 3 seconds to load or 8 seconds to load is immaterial because the user's eyes don't return to the screen for 12-20 seconds. So when you sneak an SSD or SSHD into that users machine, they don't notice cause:
a) the file they are loading is sitting on the HD and therefore the SSD isn't helping anything
b) They are busy doing something else that has to be done regardless of how fast the file loads.
Who is more productive ?
User 1 (SSD) - Loads file (takes 3 seconds), but rather than watching screen, begins to read what changes have to be done (12 seconds) and starts typing 12 seconds after launching the file
User 2 (SSHD) - Loads file (takes 3.1 seconds), but rather than watching screen, begins to read what changes have to be done (12 seconds) and starts typing 12 seconds after launching the file
User 3 (HD) - Loads file (takes 4.5 seconds), but rather than watching screen, begins to read what changes have to be done (12 seconds) and starts typing 12 seconds after launching the file.
I compare an SSD to owning a Porsche ... it's an impressive machine, brings a smilel to your face when you are able to experience it's abilities, but in the end, when my neighbor and I leave for work (in the same office building) at the same time and he's in his Toyota Corolla, we both get to work at the exact same time because the reality is that rush hour traffic rather than horsepower determines the commuting time.
So yes on a test bench, SSDs edge SSHDs and are much faster than HDs. Put people into the equation and the advantage pretty much disappears. In the workplace, no manager will every be able to financially justify installing SSDs on a normal office scenario as no productivity increases will ever be realized. Boot time ?...whether SSD's 15.6 seconds, SSHD's 16.5 or HDs 21.2 seconds doesn't affect anything because Bill is chatting with Harry about the Stupor Bowl while hanging up his jacket, Mary is chatting w/ Kathy about last night's NJ housewives while looking at what was placed in her inbox, Sue is listening to her phone messages and Adam is talking on his cell phone about today's lunch meeting w/ the boss.
Now in a production (video editing, animation, rendering, etc.) environment, you can certainly justify the investment as performance of the storage subsystem does have huge impact on time to completion which does impact the bottom line... that's why there are $1,000 CPUs and CUDA cards in those boxes too.
But here where it comes down to a better card or an SSD, the card will impact the user for every second of the gaming session which for a typical gamer is 35 hours a week. The SSD **might** have an impact on loading time but, in most instances, there is no relevant impact as the user is logging into his voice chat app, launching whatever notes data he / she keeps for stats, craft recipes, whatever ... walkthru sites. So it comes down to maybe 5 seconds of faster loading time or do you focus on the 35 hours per week of playing time ?
The other part is, that 120 GB SSD is going to be filling up with junk repeatedly. Despite here you install a game or program, it will still load common files on C:\ . That maintenance has to be weighed against any theoretical time savings.
We typically use / recommend and 250 GB SSD for apps and programs (maybe fav game or 2) and an SSD for data and other games. When budget is an issue, a) the SSHD provides better overall performance than SSD + HD b) it's also cheaper and c) the SSD easily can be added later, duplicating the OS partition from the SSHD to the SSD. For the $20 premium, can't see a reason to ever use a HD, we haven't installed one in 7 years
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