I recently bought a new computer for home and it came with two drives, one HDD and other SSD. The later is used for the OS and the former stores all of my personal files. From all computers I had, both home and work, this is definitely the fastest. While some of the merits are due to the newer CPUS and RAM, the SSD drive can make all the difference in file operations.
My research usually deals with large files from financial markets. Being efficient in reading those files is key to my productivity.