I will give that a whirl, I had an SSD on standby that I can use.
An SSD will certainly provide faster I/O time than the mech drives. I was referring to creating a RAM drive and using that as the data directory for bitcoind.
Assuming some flavor of Linux:
mkdir /mnt/ramdisk
mount -t tmpfs -o size=50G tmpfs /mnt/ramdisk
This of course assumes you've got enough RAM to cover that request. Then you put the bitcoin data directory there, start your bitcoin daemon to point to the new ramdisk data directory.