IO DEVICES AND LATENCY

Summary from the TLDR Web Dev newsletter

Non-volatile storage has evolved from tape drives to hard disk drives (HDDs) and solid-state drives (SSDs). While tape storage is cost-effective for large-scale archiving, HDDs and SSDs provide faster access speeds, with SSDs eliminating mechanical components for lower latency. Cloud computing introduced network-attached storage, which is scalable, but introduces latency and IOPS limitations compared to directly attached storage. PlanetScale Metal is a hybrid, using directly-attached NVMe SSDs in a replicated Vitess+MySQL cluster to overcome the shortcomings of network-attached storage.