Why not two SSD drives then?

>As the vfp process is only 1/3 of needed processing time the "core" argument only works part.
>There probably is more performance to be gained for that 2H recurring vfp task by optimizing, but that won't speed up the file conversion by external tools.
>
>SSD will speed up reading of small files scattered over the disk - but the described task ***might*** be better off by using two separate physical disks giving in and output the chance to operate without head movement on traditional disks with a third one housing program and OS, as writing to SSD is slower than reading and bulk writing to traditional disk with a large RAM buffer can be blindingly fast. Coupling that with good housekeeping like having a newly formated partion with more than 3 times the space really needed only used for those data files will make fragmentation worries moot. The info offered on the task (80000 files in 2H of vfp and 4H of other processing) is not nearly enough to get a clear picture, 11/5.5 files per second might be mostly I/O or mostly processing - reworking JSON or XML files is different from adding a header to video files ;-)