[jordansissel]

This experience sounds especially bad. Sorry about that.

As mentioned in another comment in this post, I was doing 300gigs of data per day with an elasticsearch cluster size of 7 elasticsearch nodes (16 cores & 16gb ram per node) and load was around 5-10% cpu utilization.

100MB/day is pretty small in terms of log data, I think. If you attempt this again, please invoke the community (elasticsearch's is great!) and see if we can assist you in figuring out what's busted.