Everything helps I believe. I think it was a slight exaggeration with program load times. Unfortunately on this machine I don't have any 'heavy' apps to load. Browsers, sketchup, win media player, handbrake were the apps I tested. I have photoshop on my workstation pc but it's also running an ssd and I wanted to check using a 7200rpm hdd. Using passmark's apptimer, I opened them once (successive loads would have been faster, I wanted the slowest times). These programs I hardly use so they're not 'cached' and this pc's been running normal throughout the day not a fresh restart. I have several google chrome tabs open (21), yahoo messenger, a couple of explorer windows open, I played far cry 3 earlier. Current ram usage is 5.45gb of 8gb.
Load times in milliseconds.
C:\Program Files\Windows Media Player\wmplayer.exe - 1 executions
0.0075
C:\Program Files (x86)\Internet Explorer\iexplore.exe - 1 executions
0.0023
C:\Program Files\Handbrake\Handbrake.exe - 1 executions
0.0014
C:\Program Files (x86)\SketchUp\SketchUp 2014\SketchUp.exe - 1 executions
0.0019
The only reason I didn't try loading a larger game is because they're either tied to steam or uplay, both of which take forever and a day thanks to my slow internet connection and constantly needing to download updates every time I try to open one. (I miss the good ol' days of just playing a game purchased).
Considering those loaded in mere milliseconds, how much faster does an ssd need to load programs? Also note how much ram is being used with a relatively light load of programs open. The cpu is likely holding things back. It also depends on how full the hard drive is (my earlier tests were done on a 100gb partition with only 12.8gb free, roughly 12%), and the amount of ram. When ram runs low it will invariable hit the swap file on the hdd causing massive slowdowns and sluggishness.