Having lost 5 hard disks due to a failing motherboard (or SATA controller) in 3 months, I must say that speed is only half of the story, reliability is foremost in my book. Especially in a notebook, I appreciate it being even just a little faster (and many SSD are much faster than HDD) but I love the fact that there is no moving part at all. I take relieability over speed anyday.

Arch is probably more protected from corruption than SVN in the sense that you never modify any file when committing to an archive. Stuff is always added, not modified. Committing is just generating a patch-log and adding that to the archive. The window of corruption is much smaller than generating a BDB transaction.

One of the problem I found in early versions of SVN was than due to BDB, repo size was several times the data you put into it, leading to very large repo. which could be a problem.