My fellow shooters, I just replaced my hard-drive with an SSD drive, and if you have not done this, please give it a thought. I know this is a Nikon Forum, but once we've taken the pix, we have to process them so we can make some money!
For starters, let me tell you about my modest little system… iMac mid-2011, 21.5", i5, 2.5mhz, with 20gb RAM and stock 500gb HDD. Completely low-end iMac with only the RAM bumped-up from the stock 4gb. With this configuration I made a slide-show of over 400 pictures, and set various music behind it. Made this in iMovie and exported it. It was a 37 minute slide-show and took around 36 minutes to process/export. That was last Friday.
I just put in an OWC 6G, 480gb SSD drive ($365.00 @ OWC); and added 16gb RAM (now I have 32gb total RAM). I cloned my system to this new drive. I did the surgery myself--it took about 2 hours total, but I was exceedingly careful and followed their superb instruction video to the letter.
Once I had the system up and running, I tried exporting that slide-show again… it was instantaneous--it took only seconds versus 36 minutes with a spinning hard-drive. Adobe Creative Suite… Photoshop, InDesign, Illustrator open instantly… well 10 to 20 seconds until they're on the screen. I have never seen anything so fast in my life!
This SSD drive is simply amazing and I am in awe. No more spinning beach-balls in photoshop while editing photos. I can't imagine how fast this would be with a faster processor--THIS IS AWESOME!
If you haven't done this, I would highly recommend checking this out… its night and day.