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An SSD can be very fast, but note that OS X does not currently support TRIM. Make sure you get a drive that does not depend on this to keep performance from degrading.

If you don't know what I'm talking about, you may want to read up on the issue or wait until OS X adds TRIM support. SSDs will likely be cheaper by then anyway.

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True. But if you keep your old drive you can reinstall the main SSD and have it erased/zeroed. Some people recommend this over X months, depending on disk write usage.

Note: a great way to minimize small writes for developers is to create a memory filesystem and use it for temporary files. With SSDs access time is tiny but the next bottleneck is writing to the drive. Most modern Macbooks have plenty of memory for ramdisks. Perhaps the OP should buy more RAM if there's not enough (up to 900MB for big compile projects.) Again, YMMV.

Mounting a RAM drive as /tmp is probably a good idea.

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