This was my first thought, and generally what I always think when I hear about update heavy use cases. Typically they represent some issue in the object model,

This was my first thought, and generally what I always think when I hear about update heavy use cases. Typically they represent some issue in the object model, and often driven by an ORM layer. I always ask is there a need for absolute correctness, and would this be better handled by a batch processing method. I'm not sure any hardware would have solved their issue though. It may not have actually been disk speed, but issues in the mvcc design itself.