Still slow on the scale of things these days. I just provisioned a few servers with over 500,000 IOP/s / 2000MB/s read and write each, 100% SSD with 3-10 year warranties and they use bugger all power. Very low running cost and maintenance overhead and cost less than 8k a unit (1u chassis, redundant power, 32GB RAM, 2x 6 core Xeon v3) and I can guarantee the performance is consistent and there when We need it.<p>I'm all for outsourcing hardware hosting ('cloud') to save costs and to allow for quick provisioning of new instances - but went you need raw power and in cases where it's inefficient to horizontally scale - the latest generation of PCIe NVMe SSDs are really very impressive and in a recent evaluation we performed of our storage - it was actually going to work out significantly cheaper to A) host our high speed storage ourselves and B) buy SSDs and do away with rotational drives.