Cary - sounds like you are making progress on freeing memory, and that should help.
The benefit of the SSD drive is reduction of latency (in theory one clock cycle to access desired file/sector - the Input/Output (I/O) latency of drives are bounded by three factors - 1)the RPM speed of the drive [faster is better] controls the speed of the drive head positioning 2)and the raw read-through speed, and 3)the memory buffer on-board the hard-drive.
That said, it is the I/O performance of your drive that will typically be the limit, not the bus speed of the MB.
Pointing to another drive partition on the RAID may be faster.
I just thought of another low-cost option, add a card-reader, and mount a 4G or 8G SD card, and use that as the accelerator for the page file.
