I have some recent experience switching from all HDDs to SSD for my main drive, and I would like to share some experience.
Before I upgraded, After Effects took about one to two and a half minutes to load. With everything installed on an SSD, it now takes
7 seconds from clicking the icon to everything loaded and ready for work. An SSD will completely change how responsive your computer feels. One of the reasons for this is that the random access times (seek times) are an order of magnitude faster than on rotational media. With regular hard drives, they have to spin up and the read heads need to seek to the right place on the disk to find the info you requested. They can be fast for sequential access, but random access is a lot slower. SSDs do not have to wait for any moving parts.
Another thing to keep in mind about SSDs is even within a series of drives with different sizes but same model number, the speeds will vary. The read speed should be uniform across a line, but write speed will be higher on higher capacity drives because they write to multiple chips at once, and higher capacity drives will have more physical chips to write to.
Lastly, since SSD tech is fairly new, reliability can be a problem with many drives, mainly based on which controller they use. This is my opinion, but I have done a lot of research on the subject: If you decide to get an SSD, I would recommend a Samsung 830 series drive (what I have now) or a Crucial M4, the Samsung being faster but also more expensive. These drives seem to have the best reliability and least problems at the moment. Even Intel drives have had problems recently.
Zanzaben wrote:...one word of warning about that is that it is important that you just put your OS and the adobe products on it and don't put any of the media, or previews, or anything else video related on it because video editing does so many more reads and writes to a disk then most other things that SSD's will often just die from being way overworked.
I was wondering about this and also about SSD use in general. I know that most drives have a fairly limited amount of total writes per sector (I heard roughly 3000 for my drive). Do NLEs really write all that much to the drive? Are there things I should be disabling/enabling and certain ways I should use my drive differently? I made sure TRIM is working properly. I figured every now and then it would be okay to have a large render on the drive for editing purposes as long as it is not changing at all; I would not suggest rendering everything to the SSD. Even limited to 3000 total writes per sector, the drive would still last 8 years if you were to write and erase the entire drive every day (I admit that would be really excessive).