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I have a HTPC that occasionally locks up for a couple of seconds while playing video. I currently have two normal hard drives in there, one for OS and the latest videos we're watching and a second for archiving the videos to. The lock-ups are annoying enough for me to look at upgrading at least one of these to a solid state drive. If I was to upgrade one, which would give me the best performance improvement - moving the OS to it, or storing the videos on it?

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I don't think a SSD will help you with your problem, those "lock-ups" are usually caused by the software. – Michael K May 18 '11 at 10:34
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I have a feeling it's not the harddrive that's the issue. I think it's more likely that you're short on RAM, which is much cheaper to upgrade. – MBraedley May 18 '11 at 10:35
how much RAM does the system have? (and what's the speed of the RAM if you know it?) – tombull89 May 18 '11 at 10:37
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@dlanod What OS? The Resource Monitor in Windows 7 should help isolate the bottleneck (CPU, hard-disk, memory, or network). Also, it would be a waste to use an SSD for (mostly) static data - SSDs excel at random reads/writes and should significantly improve performance when used as the OS drive. – sblair May 18 '11 at 11:34
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Use it at the OS drive... even if you can't put more RAM in it having an SSD for swap will give some minor preformance increases, particularly while playing video. However I do agree with everyone else here chances are it's a CPU or RAM bottle neck. – Kyle May 18 '11 at 12:43
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closed as not a real question by studiohack♦ May 20 '11 at 22:19

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