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Assuming a PC has plenty of RAM (as many cheap laptops with HDDs do), will an SSD make web browsing significantly faster? Is an SSD a worthwhile investment for someone who's in google docs and gmail all day?

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  • possible duplicate of Is it worth to buy a SSD for my desktop machine if only support SATA II?, superuser.com/questions/101891/…, superuser.com/questions/402313/…
    – Ƭᴇcʜιᴇ007
    Nov 1, 2014 at 20:45
  • not a duplicate, this question is about the impact SSDs have on web browsing, not some unspecified I use my PC for programming will SSDs make it fast question
    – Var87
    Nov 1, 2014 at 20:48
  • Any time you want things to load from or save to disk, SSD's provide an advantage. Pease peruse the answers on the marked dupes to get an idea.
    – Ƭᴇcʜιᴇ007
    Nov 1, 2014 at 20:48
  • Yes, but does browsing involve a lot of reading and writing to the disk? I don't know. I'm sure a lot of people don't.
    – Var87
    Nov 1, 2014 at 20:50
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    It's to avoid having 100 "Will an SSD speed up my situation?" questions, when the answer is always the same: yes it will increase performance in comparison to a HDD. But hey, it takes more than just my vote to close.
    – Ƭᴇcʜιᴇ007
    Nov 1, 2014 at 20:56

2 Answers 2

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Your browser will start faster. After that, unless you have an extremely fast low-latency internet connection (as in ≥400 MBit/s, ≤10 ms), you won’t get any speed boost, because your disk will always be able to keep up with the internet.

There could, however, be other programs eating up all the IOPS your disk can provide. In that case, you may get slowdowns. This scenario of course depends on what you’re doing while browsing. Listening to music? No problem. Backing up your hard disk? That’s gonna hurt. Even with an SSD.

So no, it won’t help under most circumstances.

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No matter how much RAM you have in your PC, there will be always files cached to local disk while you surf (unless you specifically configured your browser not to). Those cached files will be used when you revisit the previously visited web sites.

With an SSD, you will get benefits of speed and low latency access of cached files, so an SSD will definitely make your browsing experience faster! But these days, regular HDDs are pretty much gives enough speed to access those cached files and you will hardly notice that speed up.

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    odd that this answer is getting downvotes..
    – Var87
    Nov 1, 2014 at 20:52
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    I'm not sure why either, it's a legitimate answer, except maybe the last sentence about HDDs that basically contradicts everything else said before. :/
    – Ƭᴇcʜιᴇ007
    Nov 1, 2014 at 20:54
  • browsers always cache data to the disk, thus faster disks make browsing faster... seems relevant
    – Var87
    Nov 1, 2014 at 20:55
  • @VanSku It definitely is, once I changed my SATA-II HDD with IDE 10GB HDD and tried to install a copy of Windows 7 just for fun, and noticed huge slowdown when using same browser on the SATA hard drive even though the OS had nothing installed on it other than updated drivers. Also, there was a lot of space left on the drive and it was defragmented just for the sake of it.
    – Little Helper
    Nov 1, 2014 at 21:12
  • @VanSku You didn't mention what operating system you are using, but if you're on Windows Vista (if I am right) or later then the most accessed files would get read into RAM, in your case, the same browser cache mentioned above, so definitely an inprovement in speed right there.
    – Little Helper
    Nov 1, 2014 at 21:12

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