On the personal computing front, my opinion is getting your OS and applications on an SSD is probably the biggest upgrade you can do to your laptop/desktop in regards to performance. If you purchase an SSD big enough to house your user data and VM’s as well, all the better. In the end, time is money, I know my time is worth something. Having to wait a couple minutes for a system to boot adds up. Sitting there watching my application icon bounce half a dozen times in the dock (in OS X) before it launches, compared to not even 1 full bounce when my OS is on an SSD is a big difference. Those times add up, and my overall experience is much better with SSD’s installed on my personal systems. I also run multiple VM’s on my laptops, so having the SSD helps. If you DO have newish MacBook Pro, a popular option is to install a mid-size SSD (like 256GB), and then replace the optical drive with a larger spinning drive (this option exists for many PC laptops as well). This gives you cheap data storage plus the performance of an SSD.
