I use two 2.5" microdrives setup a RAID 1 on my Mac Pro workstation for all my active working data. I use these to hold by working data as one drive can fail and the data is retained on the other drive. RAID 0 should not be used for anything other than a scratch disc as it double the odds of losing your data with a drive failure. On SSD there is not going to be a performance gain and SSD is fast for reads but not for writes when dealing with large blocks of data like a camera image file.
For batch processing I have one drive for the OS and applications, the two RAID 1 drives for my working data, another very small drive for the scratch drive, and another drive as the output drive. When doing batches of 2500-3000 files I get more than adequate performance. Backup is to a 4 disc array set for RAID 5 over a 1GB Ethernet connection.
The Mac Pro workstation made this easy to do but my next workstation will not be from Apple. I cannot justify the $2200 premium charged for the Apple boxes and I dislike the way the OS is not maintained for older machines. My current Mac cannot use the current OS release and without the current release I cannot use the latest video cards and without the latest video cards I cannot use the latest displays. I can either spend $3000 on a new Mac or spend $800 on a HP or Lenovo tower with Windows 7.
There is a point of diminishing returns where the perceived bottleneck is actually not the bottleneck or any improvement will be trivial in terms of the overall operation. I ran compilers on computers that took 12 hours to run and then with faster computers I got it down to 30 minutes and then to 60 seconds. No reason after that to go any further as it really did not matter. In some ways it was better when the compile took 30 minutes as I got a break from the computer.
