[alabut]

"But it's probably not the processor that accounts for most of the speed increase I've seen in my machine. The main help, I think, comes from the hard drive."

He's totally right about using an SSD as the boot disk, I can't overstate how much of a difference it makes, more than RAM, CPU or anything else. I've been using one for a while and it made my secondhand 3-4 year old macbook pro go from barely usable for design work to screaming top of the line.

I'm probably going to switch to a hybrid drive soon though, like the 500GB Momentus XT that comes with a 4GB SSD glued on. The big drawbacks of using a pure SSD as a boot disk are that you'll either 1) run out of space on the SSD and/or 2) forced to keep the data on a slower separate drive, assuming that you're going with a moderately priced one and not spending a gazillion dollars for one of the big ones with a lot of capacity. #2 might not matter to the OP because he said he upgraded his rig just for the web browsing, but designers like me routinely load up and work with large files, so I still get the beach ball every time Fireworks tries to open a file or save it. This is where I differ from the OP and the Jeff Atwood article he linked to: I'd rather put all of my data on just as fast a disk as the one with the OS and apps. The slowdown in opening large files is super annoying after you've gotten used to the near instant times for booting the OS and starting up apps.

If I had one of the newer MBPs that came with a SATA interface for the optical drive (instead of IDE like mine), I'd seriously consider splurging and going with Stammy's dual RAID SSD setup:

http://paulstamatiou.com/how-to-apple-macbook-pro-raid-0-arr...

Even though I can't use it for RAID, I'm still going to swap out the optical drive for an older IDE-compatible MCE optibay with a generic 500GB drive just for backups with time machine and super duper. That way I can ditch the pocket drive I've been carrying around this whole year and leave it at home for nightly backups.

[kscaldef]

Not to knock the SSD, but I actually don't understand why it should help significantly in the use case that the author was primarily talking about: large numbers of tabs open in your browser. My instinct there would be that more and faster RAM, and then to a lesser extent CPU cycles would be what's important. Unless it turns out that you've got so many tabs open, and you're cycling through them enough that you're going to swap and your swap partition is on the SSD. But then, again, it seems like more RAM is at least as good a solution as an SSD.

Can someone explain to me why an SSD should be a big win for web browsing?

[chadaustin]

Conventional drive: on the order of 800 IO ops per second.

Good SSD: on the order of 20,000 IO ops per second.

Now consider a hard page fault or disk access (browser cache, whatever) and reverse the above numbers:

Conventional drive: ~1 ms / disk access

Good SSD: 50 microseconds / disk access

That adds up quickly.

[nuriaion]

In my experience the browser still saves/load a lot from the Harddisk. (OS X with 4GB RAM, YMMV) So a SSD also helps when i'm only using the browser with many tabs.