Best Win7 drive setup (ssd/hdd location for program and cache/incompletes)

[rabidpuppy]

I'm going to be building a new Win7 PC soon.  Is it better to have sabnzbd installed on a ssd or regular hdd?  Same question for the download (cache & incomplete) location.

My original thought was to have a ssd for my OS/apps, and a WD "Black" drive for sabnzbd (keeping the install and downloads on the same said drive).  I guess the alternatives are to either have everything on the ssd (having categories for completes on a connected storage hdd), or even have another separate ssd.

Just wondering if a ssd is recommended due to the high disk usage.

Cheers.

[shypike]

I would use the hard disk for all folders.

[ziddey]

It's optimal to have your incomplete and complete folders be on different drives.

SSD definitely helps if you have an insanely fast connection. Back when I had access to campus internet, I was able to download in excess of 13MB/s. I was definitely bottlenecked by my HDD if I was say downloading an entire series of a show and only had 1 traditional HDD. I added a SSD and had it download to the SSD initially, and then unpack to the big drive. No more bottleneck. That said, I didn't realize to increase the article cache limit, as I'm sure that'd help as well. IIRC, there was no quickcheck back then either.

PAR/RAR times shrank incredibly.

[kiljaden]

Considering how todays SSD's have a "small number of writes"  ussing  a SSD drive as a download drive would make a mid range SSD fail quite quick.

So my advice would be don't use a SSD as a download drive ,because even if it would speed up the entire process it would ruin sooner or later the SSD.

But you could use instead two different drives : one for the incompelte/complete folders and the other for the unpack area. The download drive needs to be 7200 rpm model because it does need the extra speed and better IOPS, and the unpack drive can be a big fat green drive (5400 rpm) because unpacking doesn't need to much IOPS.

Also you could just use one single 7200 rpm drive , and activate either the IONice parameters which will  reduce disk priority of repair/unrar , or simply pause the download while repair/unpack. More info can be found here http://wiki.sabnzbd.org/configure-switches

[rabidpuppy]

This is what I ended up with

Sab program files, incomplete etc on one WD 600GB VelociRaptor (SATA3 10k)

complete goes onto one of 5 Hitachi Deskstar 5K3000 2TB drives (SATA3 "coolspin") depending on category

OS is win7 64bit on a Vertex3 SSD

This seems to work very well with no system impact, bottleneck or churning unlike my previous system.