The applications are very heavy on disk usage ramping to 90 - 100% disk usage. Probably the apps need to be tweaked to reduce this I/O activity.

I have an SSD and this causes some noticable lag. I shudder to think what it's like when a standard hard drive.

Also, I'd appreciate not using all the cycles on my SSD in a month.

I'm using Primo Cache on my Windows machine. It reduces the disk usage and runs the apps in ram cache.