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No, not at all!
The most SSDs these days make 250-260MB/s sequential read. The fastest mechanical drives (2TB 7200MB/s, Raptors are slower) only reach half of that speed.


what about writes of large files? forgot the details but there is still a hit due to the way SSD's write data
 
If, during the hangs, at least one CPU core is pinned at 100%, then you can say that the CPU is the bottleneck.

The application is not 64-bit. I get a peak of 140 KB/sec on the hard drive. I have attached a Grab of the CPU usage graph in Activity Monitor, updated every 1 second. The green is %User and the red is %System usage.
 

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The application is not 64-bit. I get a peak of 140 KB/sec on the hard drive. I have attached a Grab of the CPU usage graph in Activity Monitor, updated every 1 second. The green is %User and the red is %System usage.
Well, at 140KB/s it's not drive access, and it's probably not RAM-bound, either, since that would cause swapping and corresponding disk access. But it certainly looks like the activity is pinning both of the cores at 100% for a little while, and there's obviously no background task eating up CPU, since use is essentially 0 otherwise.

Therefore, the issue is that the app is CPU bound. No real way to say what the cause is--maybe it just takes a lot of horsepower to do what it does, or it could be inefficiently written, or there could even be a bug in it that's causing it to work harder than need be. The fact that it's maxing both cores, not just one, does tell you that it's multithreaded, which means it's at least trying to be efficient with resources (and may well get faster if you threw a four-core processor at it).

Not likely a lot you can do, unless it's a bug there's a way to work around.

Also, there are very, very few applications that benefit in any meaningful way from being 64-bit vs. 32-bit. High-end programs that need a LOT (as in, more than 4GB) of RAM will, but in almost everything else the difference is negligible if it exists at all.
 
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