Advantages of separate /home partition on HDD + SSD setup

I have a brand new SSD and would like to optimize my Ubuntu 12.10 installation for best speed and durability of device. From what I know, there should always be a lot of free space in an SSD, and write operations should be kept to a minimum. Since I always tend to have a lot of junk in the Documents/Pictures/Music/Download folders, I was wondering if it would be a good idea to mount /home on a separate HDD, or to just change the directories for Documents/Pictures/Music/Download by editing the $HOME/.config/user-dirs.dirs file. What would be the performance cost with the first method? Are there any important system files in /home that need to be frequently acessed to? (right now I already am mounting /tmp in RAM and using it for Firefox cache)

The problem with putting /home on a spinning disk is that a bunch of things that could take advantage of the SSD (like all the tiny files your browser uses for example) would be on the HDD instead of the SSD, you can mitigate this by using some symlinks:

• How do I symlink certain directories in /home to an SSD?
• What in /home would benefit from being on an SSD?

In this case, you're probably better off putting all of ~.config on the SSD. I wouldn't worry about keeping writes to a minimum, newer SSD drives don't have that problem.

The symlink idea would require micromanagement. See How do I install and use flashcache/bcache to cache HDD to SSD? for info on using bcache and alternatives.