general purpose SSD offers a good bang for your buck. The "best/most consistent" disk performance on amazon is still (unfortunately) ephemeral disks in a raid set. But if you turn that instance off (or Amazon decides to turn it off for you...) bye-bye to your local data. Not an acceptable risk for a database.<p>And still, after all these years, AWS won't replace a failed ephemeral disk in your instance. Is there a technical reason for this??<p>If one of the large cloud providers wants to become competitive in this space, all they need to do is offer instances with local storage that are in a hardware raid set with truly large volumes. Heavy disk-io applications are still much better suited on-prem where you have the flexibility to build these types of monsters. 5TB spinning disks are going for under $200 these days.<p>Or AWS could just start replacing disks on their m1 series machines...