I think it's the other way around. I had a classifier in python hitting a sqlite db for every new training instance and it was taking forever, with the SSD it was done in 20% of the time. So developers these days are in danger of presuming that the deployment platform i/o is as fast as their development machines and shipping slow apps to users (or to their servers that are still on mech drives).
It's noticable in all sorts of things beyond startup times when you swap over to a SSD drive. Even something simple like browsers; browsers speed up because whatever they are using to store history and the currently open tabs for crash recovery doesn't have an i/o lag and so the interface becomes much more snappy and pleasant to use with a solid state drive. Should your app write such small things immediately, and slow down the UI for a fraction of a second, or cache the writes in memory a little longer for not-so-critical data and write at an opportune moment? Depends on the app, but people should be wary.
That said, I will echo everyone else who uses them and say it's the single best investment you can make in your machine. Especially with 40 gig drives around $100, even if that requires a bit of juggling when you fill it up and have to move some of your data from your OS drive to your legacy drives/backup solution.
It's noticable in all sorts of things beyond startup times when you swap over to a SSD drive. Even something simple like browsers; browsers speed up because whatever they are using to store history and the currently open tabs for crash recovery doesn't have an i/o lag and so the interface becomes much more snappy and pleasant to use with a solid state drive. Should your app write such small things immediately, and slow down the UI for a fraction of a second, or cache the writes in memory a little longer for not-so-critical data and write at an opportune moment? Depends on the app, but people should be wary.
That said, I will echo everyone else who uses them and say it's the single best investment you can make in your machine. Especially with 40 gig drives around $100, even if that requires a bit of juggling when you fill it up and have to move some of your data from your OS drive to your legacy drives/backup solution.