Does anyone have any experience using r/python with data stored in Solid State Drives. If you are doing mostly reads, in theory this should significantly improve the load times of large datasets. I want to find out if this is true and if it is worth investing in SSDs for improving the IO rates in data intensive applications.
I have to second John's suggestion to profile your application. My experience is that it isn't the actual data reads that are the slow part, it's the overhead of creating the programming objects to contain the data, casting from strings, memory allocation, etc. 
I would strongly suggest you profile your code first, and consider using alternative libraries (like numpy) to see what improvements you can get before you invest in hardware.
Data analysis using R/python and SSDs