I hope they work on optimizing the standard client soon, because it's going to get unmanageable very fast given the rate of transactions.  I'm currently testing out running the client in a RAM drive ( http://www.ltr-data.se/opencode.html/#ImDisk ).  That way I can "cheat" when it comes to all the writes and fragmentation.  Whenever I need to power down, I can just save an image of the RAM drive to my SSD and restore it when I start back up.  That way I don't have to deal with destroying my SSD or the fragmentation and speed issues of my HDD.