Additional benefits of an SSD

[kaydot]

Hello!

I am pricing out a new MBP and am wondering what other benefits there are of an SSD other than boot-up time and application start time. I rarely reboot my Mac since it's only usually needed for system updates. Can you all help me understand the additional benefits of an SSD.

Will an SSD benefit an 8gig RAM machine for:
- iOS or Android development by reducing compile times?
- benefit photoshop and darkroom work for photo-finishing?
- application switching due to faster page-out/page-ins?

Any other non-obvious benefits of an SSD would be nice to hear too. If it's mostly just app starts and boot-up times, I can probably keep the extra money for other stuff.

 

[Detrius]

Yes to all of the above, though it will only help application switching if 8GB of RAM isn't enough. It will speed up all disk I/O. From my experience, compiling software tends to be more CPU and RAM intensive than disk intensive, but it obviously needs a lot from the disk, so it'll help.