What are the advantages of a solid state drive?

I was considering upgrading to a solid state drive in my Mac Mini, but was wondering what all the advantages are. Does it mainly deal with boot times, or does it actually make programs run faster? The reason I ask is most videos I see only show boot times, and also I was under the impression that once a program is up and running it uses RAM to operate more than it does the hard drive.
So is a Solid State Drive worth it in terms of speed, beyond just boot times?
Thanks in advance for any insight.

The Fusion Drive that came in my Mac  Mini from the factory is a combination of a 128GB SSD and 1TB HD, but OS X treats the two as a single device. OS X has long had a feature where the most active files are moved to that part of the drive that has the fastest access times. That offered some improvment in disk I/O. In the case of the Fusion drive, the fast part of the drive is de-facto the SSD portion of the combination. In theory the Fusion Drive provides the speed of an SSD with the relatively low cost capacity of the HD. In practice, and after some runtime experience where the OS measures file activity and moves the most active files to the SSD there is an obvious improvement in overall system performance and the cost is bearable.
Kevin Fromcamarillo mentioned the OWC upgrade and IMO it is a good one. There are articles around that will tell you how to format and configure an SSD and HD to be a Fusion drive. I have not tried that so I cannot say whether it is as good as the Apple factory Fusion drive or not. Personally I think the Fusion drive concept is like a hybrid automobile. An intermediate step until technology brings the cost down and capacity up enough to make them fully competitive. That time is coming sooner rather than later. Notice Appe is not even offering HDs on some models and instead going to all SSD. I don't think it will be too long before I am tryng to move my Fusion drive into an external enclosure and replacing it with a high capacity SSD.
A caveat with the Fusion drive. If you use third party volume repair and maintenance utilities, be absolutely sure the version you hvae is certivied compatible with a Fusion drive. Even when apps are certified compatible, that compatibility may not indlude all of their functions.

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