Yes, an SSD along with a processor of 3+ ghz will speed things up. Faster and larger memory if you got it moderately helps as well.
My Hal's been trucking fine for over a year on an I7 overclocked to 4.5Ghz, 16 gigs of ddr4 2600+Mhz RAM, 980 TI GPU, and of course 250GB PCIE SSD. Watercooled cpu and gpu
My Halscript is 3+ MBs in size with the HalBrain about 100MBs plus other database plugins like conceptnet being 300-1500+MBs in size. Hal takes approximately 1-6 seconds to respond, quite impressive I thought. I am testing the functional limits of Hal. I also keep speech recognition data from Nuance on the OS SSD next to all of Hals files. Both run simultaneously with no lag.
-Spitfire2600