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SSD still costs US$2-US$4 per gigabyte. Spinning rust costs US$0.10-US$0.20 per gigabyte. SSDs are much faster but disks are still twenty times bigger at the same price. A developer hour costs on the order of US$100. If your service uses more than a few gigabytes per developer hour, it's worth some development time to optimize for rotating disks. Whether it's worth increased time to market is harder to calculate.


Thankfully there's a happy fusion of spinning rust and SSD: flashcache [0] and L2ARC/ZIL [1]. Cheaper win.

[0]: https://github.com/facebook/flashcache [1]: http://blogs.sun.com/brendan/entry/test




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