IO devices and latency

This post provides a historical overview of non-volatile storage devices (tape, HDD, SSD), explaining their functionality and performance characteristics through interactive visualizations. It highlights the advantages of SSDs over tape and HDDs due to the absence of mechanical components, leading to lower latency. The post also introduces PlanetScale Metal, which utilizes locally attached NVMe drives for cloud databases, promising faster queries, low latency, and unlimited IOPS, contrasting it with network-attached storage.