[fear91]

SSD drive saved my life when I had to query a 300 GB MySQL table that couldn't fit in my RAM. Since the data was organized by the primary key ( which was random in the SELECT queries), both reads and writes had to come from random places and the whole process became IOPS bound ( ordinary HDD can query only around 75-150 different disk areas per second). So while a normal HDD can achieve good sequential read speed, it SUCKS when it comes to reading data spread randomly.

I was amazed how much improvement I've seen just by getting an SSD - and how cheap it was compared to all other solutions.