> In this same timeframe, latency on network cards became lower than latency to your drive controller. Reading something out of memory on another machine in the same data center was faster than getting it off of your own disk.
That era started before SSDs went mainstream, and it's not over. RDMA has much lower latency than NAND flash, which is why NVMe over Fabrics is getting so popular. Fetching data from a locally attached SSD isn't much faster than fetching it from a different server in the same rack.
To put some numbers on that, typical TLC flash is around 50 microseconds to access, optane and specialized SLC flash are under 10, and an infiniband connection between machines is around 1 to 1.5 microseconds.
Was this before SSDs?