Will SSD improve rendering speed?

[wildernessbob]

I have a MacBook Pro 5.3 mid 2009 and use CAD software to design houses. the latest CAD upgrade is taxing the poor thing. it still works well enough i suppose, but if i have to do a big design job it slows down. it seems to be fine in 3D but zooming is a bit jittery and there is a lag when doing the drawing. a friend suggested i upgrade to an SSD. from what i have read and my basic understanding of these magic silver boxes, it will speed everything up except the rendering, because that is more graphics card related and not memory access. so basically, will the investment help in my case or is it simply time to buy a new machine?

 

[AFEPPL]

SSDs only speed up random IO, nothing magic about them at all.
So if the data is being read for the storage level, yes, if its from RAM, no.

 

[MacUser2525]

I have a MacBook Pro 5.3 mid 2009 and use CAD software to design houses. the latest CAD upgrade is taxing the poor thing. it still works well enough i suppose, but if i have to do a big design job it slows down. it seems to be fine in 3D but zooming is a bit jittery and there is a lag when doing the drawing. a friend suggested i upgrade to an SSD. from what i have read and my basic understanding of these magic silver boxes, it will speed everything up except the rendering, because that is more graphics card related and not memory access. so basically, will the investment help in my case or is it simply time to buy a new machine?

More than likely time for new faster processing machine. Seems like most of your bottleneck is the processor/graphics here. To check use something like iStat Menus to look at the hard drive access, memory and processor load while doing your normal routine. If high load on HD then new ssd would help if the memory or processor are showing high load then more memory in that case will help if processors then new machine. Graphics load well new machine only way to solve that as well.