Does a "Master" SSD speed up a "slave" Mechanical Hard Drive?

WD Internal Drives Desktop & Mobile Drives
1

Should i installed a SSD (somewhere from 60 to 256GB size) as a Master Drive 0 and load it with a Windows 7 OS, and i also kept a “slave” 2 TB drive -a Mechanical 7200 rpm one, as Drive 1-,
how would the SSD affect native speed of the mechanical one (if it does at all!). Could anyonw please explain how the drives would interact? and how would that interaction affect the overall speed of the PC?

I dont do video games at all… most of my time is spent web surfing. on e-mail and live TV viewing and recording TV shows via the Windows Media Center. Start-up time is not an issue cause i start the PC once every 2 days at most.

My system is a Dell Studio 540 with Intel Q9550 2.83 Mhtz Quad Core, Windows Home Premium 64-bit, 6 GB RAM DDR2 dual channel PC 6400 800 Mhz, nVidia GTS 240 1Gb Video Card and Haupagge 1250 single TV tuner card. Western Digital Black Caviar 2TB 2001FASS. Comes with space for two 3.5" hard drives

I guess the grand question would be is it worth spending the big bucks on a SSD when most of the data you would be accessing still resides on a mechanical drive?

I would like to hear views and opinions on this issue of speeding up access to data , if you were in my situation what route would you go and why?

Thank you kindly.

2

It will Boot faster, but it will not speed up your Slave drive,.

3

The SSD allows you to specialize your drives.  One drive for the OS and any programs that might need fast disk access.  And another drive for data storage.

This will speed up the mechanical drive in the sense that it will be accessed less frequently and, hopefully, have more sequential reads (which it’s relatively good at) instead of random reads (which a mechanical drive is awful at).

An SSD might be, say, 5x faster on a sequential read  but it will be about 100x on a random read, so using the SSD for the OS and programs is good and use the mechanical drive for audio/video storage (where the reads will be sequential) or for programs that aren’t being used.