>>A good point - that can be checked on Win8 using PerfMon: http://www.thewindowsclub.com/how-to-use-perfmon-performance-monitor-windows , selecting the counter Logical >Disk...Average Disk Queue Length as a first cut. My understanding is an average value over 2 probably means a bottleneck.
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>>Perhaps the problem is not CPU-bound but rather IO-bound? (i.e. the bottleneck is in disc I/O rather than lack of "number-crunching" ability of CPU)
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>Is there some setting or something else that can improve the performance of an SSD? I ask because you are suggesting the problem could be the HD IO. If that were the case what could he change. I thought the SSD was that fastest he could get.
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there is always one for reading, one for writing. But thousands of individual files just screams for distributing across multiple machines or multiple tasks for multiple cores if IO is not saturated.