Excellent statement from Alexander Grosse (Soundcloud’s Vice President of Engineering) about using SSDs for the main application (music data is served via Amazon EC2/S3 afaik, not via SSDs), heard at “Wie Soundcloud skaliert” (How Soundcloud scales), Berlin Expert Days 2013:

Unsere SSDs zucken nichtmal. Die dümpeln bei 10% load vor sich hin… Our SSDs don’t even give a damn. They are at 10% load all the time…

And this is not a casual high-traffic site, this is Soundcloud ! More highly interesting stuff and deep insights into the front- and backend of one of the largest and most existing websites on the planet in Soundcloud’s awesome developer blog. And yes, they really use MySQL… ;) http://backstage.soundcloud.com/ By the way, Soundcloud is hiring! http://soundcloud.com/jobs