[problems]

Not to mention you'll get 3-5x better IOPS off a dedicated SSD.

I guess this just boils down again to Amazon not being cost effective enough for my use case in yet another way.

[phonon]

Actually, you can get way more than 3-5x better IOPS on your own SSD! Different types of storage have different types of trade-offs. EBS is great for some things, slow and overpriced for others...