List of Mining Tech in My Current World, its about 1 week old.
1. Wood Pic
2. Stone Pick
3.Iron Pic
4. RedPower2 Gem Pick
5. ComputerCraft Mining Turtle
6. 3 Diamond Picks (1.Fortune 2.Silk Touch 3.Unbreaking)
7. RedPower 2 TBM
#7 is a WIP, as I need some tech first, the list is as follows.
EnderChests for Transport of Batteries and Raw Resources
Sorting Machines & Tubes for Processing Resources
IC2 machines for Processing, plus the power needed to run all of these
Extra Dimensional Barrel Upgrades for Storing 1024 stacks of stuff like copper and tin ingots
Lots more Blutric Power, as all my current power is used to fuel an automatic stone brick maker, and my tree farm that provides fuel for my turtles.
I play with GregTech with all hard settings enabled, so its rather tough to get stuff like blaze rods, and macerators.
I would say that having 2 or 3 mining turtles digging from layer 16 to layer 5 is much better than mining by hand, even with max fortune enchant. They dig out a 64x64 area each, so I dig out roughly 120k items and blocks per run. Usually nets me about 24 diamonds per turtle, per run. Each run takes about 2 hours, so I get half a stack of diamonds every hour, and the system is totally automated using GPS, when they got low on fuel, they pull out an EnderChest, grab fuel. They dump their items into another EnderChest, which is pulled from using a filter, into barrels and chests. Cobble, and sand are both voided.
I just AFK overnight, I have never gotten this many resources before in a world.