Things slow down when you read/write from HD. I am surprised no one there suggested to use the extra ram to mount ramdisk drives. Even if I have raid SSD, that's still slowing down my stuff, so what I do I mount an few gb X: ram disk drive with:
http://www.softperfect.com/products/ramdisk/
Then I have scripts which copy my stuff in ram disk, then I run the stuff from ram disk and I could do searches within gb of data (emails, images, whatever) in millisecond, that not even SSD could (not to mention normal disks I no more use since years).
You just have to remember to run the script to copy from ram disk to real disk before to close or you lose all
