Is an SSD cost effective?

I have a Late 2012 Mac mini that’s quite slow to boot. Typically I have time to put the kettle on while it boots to the login screen each morning, and then time to open all the curtains around the house while it goes from the login screen to the desktop. As I work from home, do you think that upgrading to an SSD would be a worthwhile investment? Sandy Coleville If you’re only concerned with the time it takes to boot up each morning, probably not. You need to make that cup of coffee and open the curtains every day anyway, so you aren’t losing working time at the moment. And even if you were, you could just put your Mac to sleep at the end of the day, rather than shutting down. The difference between off and asleep is less than 1W on a Mac mini, which will cost you about £1 a year. The fast boot times are a perk of installing a solid-state drive (SSD), rather than the main justification. You’ll only feel the difference if your work involves opening and shutting a lot of applications throughout the day, or switching between several very large documents that are stored locally (rather than accessed over the network). An SSD will improve your quality of life by making everything seem faster and more responsive, but the strict return on investment is hard to quantify. A 1TB SSD costs about £350, so you’ll probably have to combine a smaller SSD with a traditional hard disk and that will make managing and backing up your data a little more complicated.