> Meanwhile cloud provider hdd storage is slower than usb2. I have a 32 core machine deployed in azure right now, and the hdd that was deployed with it has a max read speed of 10MB/s. Getting a medium performing SSD seems to cost in the realm of $250/month just for the storage, before computer costs.

It's said before, but I want to expand a little bit. You're getting 10MB/sec because your volume is running as a virtual disk on a SAN system which runs on 100s on disks which can read 15+ GB/sec, but serving to 1000 servers at the same time.

If you had local storage, you'd have the same speed because your storage backbone would have the same throughput/consumer ratio.

You want faster drives or higher throughput/consumer ratio? You'd need faster RAID cards with faster drives and more PCIe lanes.

Guess what? This is enterprise hardware again :)

> For many uses, users don't care about true reliability.

Reliability does not always concern with noisy problems (data loss, crash, file loss, etc.). The biggest problem is silent corruption. A wrongly compiled, somewhat buggy binary. A slightly wrongly trained model. A wrong outcome from a computation or simulation.

Lost files are not a problem. Wrong outcomes looking right is.