Is MATLAB performance increased if it is on SSD

Yes. There will be significant drop in speed on MATLAB.

SSD are better/faster than HDD for installing operating systems and application software because these software need to access very small but large number of files spread all over the drive. It takes more time for HDD to access these files because the platter has to rotate to get to each of these files.

Also the SATA interface is much faster than USB 3.0 interface.

Performance drops if we switch from SSD to HDD. But even more performance drops when we switch from inteal HDD to exteal HDD.