I put a second hard drive into my laptop at work. It's a traditional
HDD. I really did forget how slow these things are. That's amazing.
They're practically useless in a modern computer with a modern CPU.
Wow.
Why did I do that in the first place? Because I still don't trust
SSDs. I like to avoid writing to SSDs as much as possible. Sometimes,
I need to create larger disk images that hardly fit into a RAMDISK, so
that's what I'm using the HDD for.
Speaking of "useless": Swap partitions became useless as well. I
haven't used one in years. A few days ago, a special situation arose,
and I needed to activate a swap file. Boy, that's slow. Even on an
SSD, it's absolutely useless. There's no point in having swap
partitions on desktop PCs anymore. Just buy more RAM. You can easily
get 4 GB or even 8 GB, which is more than enough for normal workloads.
If you have more money, go for 32 GB or more, which means you don't
have to worry about RAM usage anymore -- at all.
I'm curious to see how persistent RAM will change that game.
