I agree about the disk access. Disk is by far the weakest part of my system. I do provide you mirrored disk, putting me ahead of the low-end ec2 stuff, but you are sharing that mirror with a lot of people.

Fortunately, more ram can usually make up for slow disk.

I am working on a zfs based network storage system that just might solve the problem and then some, but it's not anywhere near ready yet.