Will switching to an ssd make MBP faster?

I have a mid 2009 MBP 3.06 6GB RAM, running 10.9. I run CAD software and i'm finding that it's lagging just enought to make it anoying. and i'm sure the next CAD upgrade may make it too slow. the memory pressure is only about 20%, will switching to an SSD make any real improvements in speed? or is it my video card and is there anything i can do about that? i will have to buy a new machine, but i can't afford to until next year, so i thought this might be an affordable option to get me through. i'm not looking for miracles here, just enough of a boost to make it more usable.

The effect on an SSD depends on how much your CAD program relies on fast disk access. You have done a smart thing by determining that RAM is not the bottleneck. You should also look at the CPU section of Activity Monitor and make sure CPU is not the bottleneck, by checking what % of CPU your CAD program uses. And look at the Disk section of Activity Monitor while your CAD program is running and observe how heavily the disk is used, compared to other applications like your web browser or word processor.
If you find that your CAD program involves heavy disk access while CPU or RAM are not stressed, then yes an SSD would help it. It would also help overall speed since the OS in general hits the disk regularly.
Csound1 wrote:
Although an SSD will make your Mac faster in general, it will have little effect on video. You'd have to try it and see if it is worthwhile,
It is not clear why that comment was made since there was no reference to video applications in the original post. Even if it was, it would not necessarily be a true statement since most major video applications (FInal Cut, Premiere Pro, After Effects) are now taking extreme advantage of the video card GPU to accelerate playback and final rendering. But that doesn't apply to this question.
wildernessbob:
or is it my video card and is there anything i can do about that?
As far as this question goes, you must check with the CAD software developer to see how much application performance is affected by your video card GPU. If it doesn't, it isn't a factor. If the CAD program does make heavy use of the GPU, unfortunately the video card of an Apple laptop can never be upgraded. The only way to upgrade an Apple laptop GPU is to buy a new Apple laptop.

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