Are SSDs worth the money?

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.

Yes. If you're a developer, find an SSD with good IOPS performance. You'll save time/frustration/angst and never want to use a spinner again. Every single developer I've shown my laptop running an SSD and spinning up Xcode/eclipse/RubyMine/ Textmate/Rails/Grails/Tomcat/etc has been shocked at the speed. Once they make they jump, I invariably hear: how did I develop before this? For recommendations on an SSD, have a look at the Intel SSD's, the Crucial C300/C400, or the new Sandforce based drives. I had an Intel X25M-G2 and upgraded to a C300 and loved both.

I got a laptop with an SSD and boot times are really fast. I keep my apps installed on the SSD drive. I have a second regular HD where I store all application data.

So the primary benefit I get is fast reboot and start up of apps. The above was company sponsored laptop but I like it, and I will likely get something similar for my next personal purchase.

I had my other half buy me an SSD for my laptop for Christmas. I wasn't really interested in a boost in performance, but the ability to "throw" my laptop about without worrying about the HDD. With an active, inquisitive toddler around this has saved me a lot of worry.