Mo'Puter, Mo'Bettah Edit?

OK so here's the theory: With a 15MB RAW file size *per frame* and many projects likely to require combinations of several frames, I'm going to need a fairly well, gnarly computer to keep up. Besides it's a fun project and I already found some chump to buy the old one. So we do a little research to try and work out the best bang-for-the-buck in PC parts these days, order a few parts, and start hooking things up. Here's where it at now. Yes there will be a case to put it in, but not during the testing phase.

So far it's just your garden variety 4GHz 8MB Four processor core i5 based PC with a fairly quick video card. The real tweek to the system is those two little hard drive kinda things on the right. Usually the slowest thing in your PC, the thing you end up waiting on the most is the hard drive. PC's have been improving at a rate such that they're about 10x faster over the last 8 years. Hard drives have only improved about 2x. That's about to change.

The new Solid State Hard Drives (SSD) can, when correctly connected and set-up outperform 'regular' spinning type hard drives by a BIG margin.  Here's an example, the 'regular' drives are on the top and the new SSD's on the bottom.

This is the set of tests where at 2x to 3x difference they are CLOSEST, other tests like Random Read have the difference at more like 100x. It really does make a difference.
There must be a downside, yes?
You're right. They are of relatively small capacity and quite expensive. That seems to be changing quite quickly though.