One of the best upgrades I’ve ever made to a computer is installing an SSD drive.

The SSD drive is for purposes of booting so much faster then a conventional drive — taking my laptop about 4 seconds to boot into Linux with the XFCE window manager compared to 30 plus seconds with the traditional drive.

Applications load somewhat faster, but the real speed difference is when you are preforming operations that are highly disk intensive, such as loading a large database or processing many digital elevation models at once. Obviously, CPU intensive applications aren’t improved by SSD, so if something involves more processing then loading, the benefits will be smaller.

All together though, I’m much happier with the speed of my machine with the SSD drive installed. It’s well worth the $150 to be able to start and shutdown the machine quickly, and have more access to my files. Plus, I still have the old hard drive in the DVD drive bay, so I have ample space on my laptop for years to come.