Your hard drive is too big

A 1TB, 7200RPM drive costs like 100 bucks nowadays. At that price being able to store large amounts of crap is hardly a giant waste. Half the folks I know have burned that much money on collecting cases for their iPhones. For that matter, it might not even be necessary. Me, I've got a couple big disks, because my test data sets alone consume nearly a terabyte.

Second, I agree that having an SSD can be really beneficial. Which is why I got one. But that doesn't imply that the presence of a 1TB drive is harmful. It's absolutely OK to have both. Even a good idea, since they have different strengths. SSDs certainly have great bandwidth and latency, but price per gig is another metric that's worth considering.

For that matter, if most the work you're doing is CPU-bound and the software you work on already compiles in a second or two, there's a chance that an SSD doesn't really provide much value anyway. Booting might take longer, but any reduction in boot time below how long it takes to get my morning coffee is meaningless.

    $ iostat -kx sda sdb sdc sdd
    Linux 3.1.0-1-amd64 (Zia)       12/19/2011      _x86_64_        (8 CPU)
    
    avg-cpu:  %user   %nice %system %iowait  %steal   %idle
               0.93    0.02    0.72    0.25    0.00   98.08
    
    Device:         rrqm/s   wrqm/s     r/s     w/s    rkB/s    wkB/s avgrq-sz avgqu-sz   await r_await w_await  svctm  %util
    sdb               7.41     2.00    1.48    5.06   547.46    67.40   188.21     0.31   46.80  129.57   22.66   7.51   4.91
    sdc               7.40     2.01    1.47    5.16   547.20    77.23   188.43     0.33   50.02  164.44   17.34   6.75   4.47
    sdd               7.42     1.87    1.42    4.51   546.97    45.87   199.69     0.39   65.07  211.90   18.71   7.67   4.55
    sda               7.37     1.86    1.46    4.42   546.57    36.04   198.25     0.26   43.54  122.63   17.52   7.18   4.22

Big builds, etc. pretty much are CPU bound, even on a quad-core i7.

That's true on my single 5400 RPM disk laptop, too (though it has a much slower CPU).

These both run Linux—maybe Windows has ineffective disk caching; I don't know. But please avoid calling people who have actually bothered to measure such things and make decisions on it "fucking idiots".

(Disclaimer: no ridiculously expensive graphics cards here)

My work laptop came with a 5400rpm 750gb drive, however they provide a stipend for hardware/software I need. First thing I did, 120gb SSD, optibay (removed optical drive, put 750gb drive there), and 8gb of RAM (not near as important, especially with an SSD, but still cheap).