Would moving my Dropbox folder to an SSD have much improved performance over a HDD (both internal)?

[dolphinuser426]

Hello,

I love Dropbox, so much so that anything that I know I want to keep forever, I put on Dropbox. I use it for pretty much everything... mostly comprised of small documents, pictures, my music (I buy and curate my own local library, I'm of that generation lol) - all currently totalling ~500GB spread over ~170,000 files.

The drive my Dropbox folder is stored on is just a basic 5400 Western Digital 2TB hard drive that I've had for years. For a spinning drive, it has served its purpose until the last few months, I've noticed its starting to be a bit of a choke point for my PC.

I edit files out of the Dropbox folder in a couple of applications at the same time. I've noticed things being a little sluggish lately, especially when Dropbox is doing anything...and even loading directory contents can take like 10 seconds for a folder that has 10 files in it.

Would moving the Dropbox folder onto a SATA SSD with a DRAM cache yield much overall performance improvement?  Would it drastically increase the speed in which indexing happens? Both when rebooting (I shut my PC down every night when finished with it) and just general syncing while in use?

On paper it seems like it's an obvious answer...Yes it will be faster, but computers are just outright weird sometimes and I've found the most obvious answer turns out to be untrue. So before I spend £200 on an SSD I thought I'd get some feedback?

Much appreciated.

Edit: Now that I think about it, my motherboard has a second M.2 that I could put an nVME drive into. nVME and SATA SSD's are so similarly priced that going that route might yield even better results, assuming there are any?

[dolphinuser426]

Just be clear: the sluggish-ness only happens when Dropbox is doing anything. It's fine when it's not being trashed.

I also tried de-fragging recently, it said the drive was only 1% fragmented. I was kinda hoping it was that, but it seems Windows handles fragmentation in the background pretty well now on its own.

I really don't think this is a case of a failing drive.

[Jay]

Hi @dolphinuser426, thanks for messaging the Community.

In general, there isn't any recommendation to use a specific hard drive type to store the Dropbox folder.

Does the same behavior occur when the Dropbox desktop application has been exited completely?

This will help me to assist further!

[dolphinuser426]

Hi,
Yes when I close the Dropbox app, things speed up.
Again, I will reiterate that it seems to be noticeable when it's sync new files while I'm also using programs that store some or all of their data on the same hard drive. I guess I should have also said that I store Windows users documents folder on the same drive (not in the Dropbox folder).

To me it feels like I'm forcing the hard drive to thrash itself to keep up, but I don't recall it ever being this bad until recent weeks/months.

My brain is telling me this is an issue with the HDD being overworked and the seek time and latency of a mechanical drive not being able to keep up.

The rest of my system is more than adequate. R7 3700x, 32gb RAM, 2080ti, nVME Windows drive, 600/40mbit internet.

Thanks!

[Jay]

It depends on your requirements, however, we've not heard of any differences between SSD and HDD when syncing.