Hi. What improvements could a SSD bring to UE4 development in comparassion with a standard Hard Disk.
The same improvements that normal programs have by using a SSD? Loading and fetch times for data are quicker. I wouldn’t expect too much performance boost after it’s actually loaded though.
i find its around 4 times faster loading and autosave is no where near as painful with ssd…compiling shaders is a little quicker but not much…watch out for cheap ssds though always research before buying
Apart from straight load time deceases, an SSD also helps with reducing those small lockups from background processes accessing the drive. If an SSD is the best way to spend your money of course depends on the other components in your rig.
It’s definitely worth it, a regular HDD get sluggish as soon as a few programs are accessing it at once, an SSD will stay fast a lot longer. I would never put heavy softwares such as UE on a regular HDD. One thing that I would recommend as well is to use a RAM disk, they’re usually around 10 times faster than an SSD so it’s pretty crazy. Loading into a heavily modified Arma II server on my regular HDD took about 85 seconds, after switching to a RAM disk it took about 5.
Personally, I got 2 SSD’s when they were on sale for like half price, and use one for the OS/Programs, and the other for all my game data & code. I have not run any benchmarks, but I am extremely pleased with the performance, loading/saving & compiling go very fast compared running off my WD Black 1gb HDD that I use for storage now. Compiling 200 shaders is roughly 10 seconds, booting up Windows 8.1 is less than that.
It might be overkill, but if you find a good sale I would highly recommend going with 2 SSD’s. 
There’s another options:
Raid HDDs - cheaper solution with decent speeds but more storage.
Hybird SSD/HDD - The SSD part acts as cache so once it’s loaded it stays fast till overwritten by something else. The HDD acts as mass storage. I use one for steam.
Intel’s SRT - Similar to hybird but setup with software and 2 drives(1 SSD/1 HDD).