I'm guessing that you have never upgraded a Mac from a spinning hard drive (particularly that mini's 5400 rpm "speed demon") to an SSD.
I have one of those 2012 minis, and the speedup when replacing a spinning hard drive with an SSD, is both noticeable, and in most any type of use you can throw at it.
I have a fair range of machines now. Macs, PCs, laptops, even a tablet for whatever that's worth.
Some with HDs, some with SSDs.
Let me state this at the outset: an SSD beats an HD. Hands down. Solid state should always beat a mechanical device, both in speed and in reliability. You
will notice the difference any time you use your long-term storage device.
But again, I must ask: when are you using your long-term storage device? And why? Answering those questions will answer just how much value you will get out of the device, and therefore just how much speedup you will notice.
But, I think you are throwing out some FUD about SSDs, and the affect they will have on virtually any computer, when compared to a spinning hard drive.
Ah, "Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt." I am not trying to engender fear, and I am
all about removing uncertainty or doubt. Again: compared to a spinning hard drive, an SSD wins hands down. No question about that. But, how much time do you spend reading or writing to that drive? There are certainly some applications which require near-constant use of the drive. Web browsing, e-mail, and office apps are not among those applications; the difference between an HD and an SSD are inconsequential while they are running. Playing audio and video media
does require near-constant use of the drive, but retrieving serial data from a spinning drive makes optimal use of its design (reducing the difference between HD and SSD in this case), and in any case most media formats retrieve such small amounts of data per unit of time that the difference is inconsequential. That 5400 rpm "speed demon" you mention can stream 4K video media without breaking a sweat.
So, when exactly do you see the benefits of your SSD? Well, whenever you need to retrieve significant amounts of data from the device. I see this happening in three general situations: when you boot up the machine; when you load an application; and, when you retrieve pages of data in a database-like application. Let me take these in order:
1) Boot-up time. No question, a huge benefit when using an SSD. You can probably save more than sixty seconds on a machine with a modern (read: bloated) operating system.
So, can I ask: how frequently do you boot your machine? Several times an hour? Several times a day? Once a day?
Saving 60 seconds once per day seems underwhelming to me. And personally, I turn my machines on once, and leave them on. I only reboot when an OS update requires it, or a power outage occurs. For me, months go by between reboots. So I count this advantage as entirely negligible (other than for portables, which for obvious reasons must spend time away from an external power source).
2) Application load time. Again, no question, a huge benefit when using an SSD. And the larger the app (again, read: bloated), the bigger the advantage. So, again I ask: how frequently do you load your applications into memory? Several times an hour? Several times a day? Once a day?
Saving a few seconds once per day seems underwhelming to me. And again, I tend to load my apps into memory, and leave them there. Forever. There's no reason to open and close and reopen and reclose my e-mail app, or my browser, or my IDE.
3) Database applications. Again, no question, a huge benefit when using an SSD. And here is where I truly appreciate using solid-state storage, when I'm engaged in this sort of work. But I personally don't do a lot of database-style work, so I rarely receive this benefit.
And so, no, I don't see a whole lot of benefit from SSDs. Depending on how you use your device, you may see much more than me; but all I'm trying to say is that the benefit of SSD usage is not universal. For some people, the difference between HD and SSD is less pronounced; for folks like me, it may even be inconsequential.
But the normal use of the Mac, and macOS, means a significant part of your time in normal computer use (browsing the web, checking email, even playing games) is accessing the drive, either for reading and writing.
Nope, not true. All modern operating systems use a mechanism called "caching". If you bring up the Activity Monitor and switch to the "Memory" tab, you can find a value for the amount of memory currently involved in caching down at the bottom of the window. When an operating system engages in "caching", it will intercept any application requests to write to the drive and instead store that data temporarily in RAM. And, when an application requests to read data from the drive, it will place a copy of that data into the cache (and many operating systems will go ahead and use a prediction scheme to load related data into RAM as well, before an application calls for it).
There are several benefits to this: for one thing, RAM is
fast. Much faster than an HD. Much faster even than an SSD. So an app can quickly "store" a pile of data into the cache and return to its other business, and let the OS slowly stream that data to the drive.
For another thing, many apps will need to read from or write to the same files frequently. If those files are currently located in the cache, you never even need to touch the drive; you can retrieve the data or make the changes entirely within the cache itself.
Most modern applications (web browser, e-mail, even playing games) can easily fit within the cache, so long as you aren't starving your computer for RAM. And this is why I say a RAM upgrade can easily be more beneficial than an SSD; if you give your machine enough RAM to maintain a significant amount of cache, they will run faster than they would if they constantly had to touch a spinning drive,
and they will run faster than if they constantly had to touch an
SSD.
So, it would appear that you have your information bass-ackwards.
No, I don't believe so. The simple fact is that in terms of raw speed, SSD trumps HD, and RAM trumps SSD. Maxing out your RAM, and operating your machine in such a way as to fully utilize that RAM, will provide the greatest benefits in performance. Moving from HD to SSD will also provide benefits in performance, but the extent of those benefits depends greatly on how you use your machine.
