Recently I upgraded my system sample drive to use a raid-0 of two SSD on sata3, via pcie bus.
https://www.sonnettech.com/product/tempossd.html
The benchmark tests showed incredible improvements in raw disk performance through this raid array.
It did not make ANY difference to the VEP project load time. Before that I was using a single SSD on sata2. (MacPro 5,1).
All that being said, the longest my system has ever taken to load a VEP project is 1.5 minutes....around 100 channels of VSL instruments. Even with the single sata2 SSD that is how long it took. I can't imagine waiting 40 minutes...something is amis.