SSD vs HDD with Stencyl?

I've been thinking about potential upgrades to my PC and one of the cheaper parts is a SSD.  How much of a difference would it make compared to a HDD for use with Stencyl?  What about other programs such as graphics editors?

I didn't notice a difference between disks with Stencyl. I definitely noticed a difference between an HDD, SSD on SATA II, and SSD on SATA III for editing large graphics files. But I upgraded other things at the same time, so it's hard to pinpoint how much a difference the drive alone made.

The computer I work on came with a hybrid HDD/SDD. I was not happy with it and upgraded to a SSD and immediately noticed a difference in the speed of almost every program I use, Stencyl and Illustrator included. Regardless, I think upgrading to a SSD is a no-brainer for everyone, as far as I'm concerned. Anything to do with reading/writing files is generally faster and on top of that, the added safeguard of a much lower rate of drive failure makes a SSD one of the smartest upgrades a person could make to their computer - and as you pointed out, the price has become quite affordable. Overall, I think it's safe to say that the performance benefits of upgrading to a SSD are going to be proportional to how large your game is. Everyone benefits from the much lower rate of drive failure, however. That, alone, is worth the price to me.

My laptop has an SSD and boot times are awesome. I haven't really paid attention to any other speed increases but fast booting is a nice touch

It takes my laptop about 2.5 minutes to boot. (That's why I almost never turn it off).
I can't wait to get my hands on an SSD.

I'll just add to my previous post -- the faster times are related to reading/writing of files only ... it won't have any effect whatsoever on things like processing times for filters or transformations in graphics programs nor performance of testing games from within Stencyl (except for load times of atlases). Not sure about compiling - I don't remember, but I *think* this was faster, too.

My 2010 Macbook originally came with a 200GB hardrive. I quickly swapped that out for a 1TB Hybrid drive and noticed a faster boot time with applications and the operating system as a whole. Once SSD's dropped in price I upgraded to a 250GB SSD from Seagate (I think). Works really well, I use the 1TB for backup and large files. I noticed faster boot times, applications seem to load faster.

But ultimately it comes down to your RAM and CPU in my opinion.  Your hard drive is only going to work as fast as your RAM and CPU will let it. I've upgraded my RAM to 10GB but it's maximum clock speed is only ~1066Mhz -- not very fast by today's standards.

Back to your original question I think an SSD is very fast and worth the upgrade especially at today's prices. I'd give it a shot

I ordered a 275GB SSD, and that's probably the only upgrade I'll make before building a new PC sometime next year.  There isn't much I can do about my CPU without a new motherboard and a GPU upgrade is probably useless as even Inkscape doesn't use it much.