Increased performance with an SSD?

I Have a fully loaded 2013 iMac to do all my editing at home, but occasionally I do some editing on a 2010 macbook pro (core 2) with 8gb ram. (recently i went abroad and it was a painfully slow)

Yesterday i replaced the hard drive in a laptop for a crucial m500 480gb and boy its so much quicker (great deal on amazon for £189)

My question is, has anybody done this in their laptop and seen an improvement in using FCPX or am I restricted to the CPU/graphics and video card etc?

Yes, a quicker drive will make the applications and OS snappier to a degree. But, you still want a quick media drive apart from that to place your Libraries on. That can give a slightly added performance boost, also. And yes, CPU/GPU upgrades will also show the most dramatic and significant performance boost.

Thanks Ben

Unfortunately I'm limited to FW800 external storage on the laptop (until I upgrade). Think I will just use it sparingly in the field if necessary and carry on doing all my editing at home

From my own experience I have a 2010 macbook pro (i7) 8GB ram that I put an 500GB aftermarket SSD in. I edit off the system drive usually. Although it is clear better to cut on fast external storage, I find my set up plenty enough to cut DSLR smoothly. I also cut a bit of 4K HD epic footage (8:1) in for my last project, which it struggled with a bit, but was still usable. I'm sure you've done it, but have you made sure your preferences on the laptop are set to better performance? It makes a huge difference.

Thanks Seamusvfx, I haven't done anything but install the SSD so far. Can you clarify which preferences you mean?

NOTE: just found this webpage, is this what you mean?

apple.stackexchange.com/questions/75921/...h-settings-to-change

There's an option in the final cut preferences with a check box between better performance and better quality. I can't remember what it defaults to, but for laptop editing better performance is the way to go.

I'm not sure how much of a difference the stuff on the forum would make, but I just put the drive in and installed osx

The pref which activates the faster graphics card on some MBPs is under System Prefs>Energy saver>Graphics: Higher Performance/Better Battery life. It does make a huge difference in FCP. as you'd expect.

thanks ffg, seamusvfx couldn't find it in either of the suggested locations.

Can someone upload a screenshot of where they see it (PS Im on Mavericks)

It's actually moved in 10.1, sorry for the confusion. Its now is the drop down at the top right of the viewer window.

Screenshot here

Great thanks, I changed the laptop.. must admit I have changed my my iMac to better quality to see if there is any difference