Granted, I do have an old fashioned hard drive, not an SSD. I'm seriously thinking of upgrading and am wondering whether bumping up my RAM or adding in an SSD would be better off performance wise. Any thoughts there?
If you seldom run several RAM-demanding apps at the same time, I would say you'll be better off with an SSD. Otherwise, considering your current 5 GB of RAM, I would go for the RAM extension. Of course, having both would be the best ;-)
If you go for the SSD option, make sure to have your system files (OS) and swap file on it, as it's what makes most of the difference. In other words, keep your hard drive for large data files. Where you will store the block chain depends on your own priorities and the capacity of your SSD; of course, it would be much faster on the SSD (regarding what deepceleron said about fragmentation, timings etc), but the blockchain is getting huge nowadays.