What about solid state disks? I'm thinking of getting one, hope usb 3.0
is fast enough to see any improvements over sata disks.

Yes, I think you will see an improvement in general operation, and certainly boot up and shut downs will be faster. And it will help to bring up the CPU efficiency on CEP2 with the large number of writes. However, if you run a Sandy Bridge or Ivy Bridge quad-core and allow all four (or eight virtual) cores to run CEP2 at once, then the writes can go through the roof. You could get 1 TB (as in terabytes) of writes per day. That may work for a few months, or even a few years, but I would not bet the life of my SSD on it. So I use a Ramdisk, to keep the writes in main memory. I think if you only allowed the default single CEP2 to be downloaded, then I would not worry much about the writes, though it could still be over 100 GB per day.

Zydor,

I am using Primo Ramdisk on three Ivy Bridge PCs at the moment; I bought the three license package. On two of the machines I am running six virtual cores each of CEP2, and they have been running fine for months with no problems at all. On the other machine, I run a couple of cores of CEP2, with another core on the Climate Prediction Network (CPDN), which also produces a LOT of writes (comparable to CEP2), and also benefits from a Ramdisk.

Two of those PCs use SSDs, but for the most recent one I just used an old 2.5 inch notebook drive I had lying around; it really doesn't matter in operation, since everything requiring high speed is done from Ramdisk anyway. But the startup and shutdown times are a lot longer with that old mechanical drive; a total of 7 minutes for a reboot with a 12 GB ramdisk. However, it is a dedicated machine, and so I can leave it alone for weeks or months at a time once it is set up (all Win7 64-bit by the way).

I also tried out again the free version of Dataram Ramdisk on my main PC (a Core2 Duo) for some CPDN work. They seem to have improved the speed of transferring the backup files to and from the disk (a Samsung Series 470 SSD in my case), and it worked quite well with even a 4 GB size ramdisk. But I finally uninstalled it due to problems with CPDN on this machine, and seemed to have had some problems getting the Ramdisk totally uninstalled as well, though that may have been more my fault than anything. I think it is still a good option, either the free or paid version.