TL;DR Modern disks are so fast that system performance bottleneck shifts to RAM access and CPU. With up to 64 cores, PCIe 4.0 and 8 memory channels, even a single-socket AMD ThreadRipper Pro workstation makes a hell of a powerful machine - if you do it right! Update 1: Since 2021, networks have gotten faster and now it is possible to have high-speed reliable remote I/O even in cloud VMs! Here’s my recent article about testing an enterprise-grade cloud storage solution and achieving over 20GiB/s ...