[mgedmin]

As a developer I often have to recursively grep large source trees. With an HDD that was painful, no matter how much RAM I added to my laptop -- the whole source tree was rarely cached. With an SSD, I can grep a few hundred megs of sources in a couple of seconds.

Now I'm someone who hates having to wait unnecessarily, and considers even 1 or 2 seconds of application startup time to be unacceptably slow (hence Chromium instead of Firefox). For me the expensive Intel SSD was worth the money.