[tonyarkles]

My not-super-humble opinion is that people didn’t notice because SSDs became mainstream/cheap around the same time cloud migration got popular. Lots of VPS providers offer pretty mediocre IOPS and disk bandwidth on the lower tiers; I’d argue disproportionately so. A $300 desktop from Costco with 8GB of RAM and a 500GB SSD is going to kick the crap out of most 8GB RAM VPSes for IO performance. So… right when rack mounted servers could affordably provide insane amounts of IO performance, we all quit buying rack mount servers and didn’t notice how much worse off we are with VPSes.