My point was more that adding RAM isn't to be as good as having an actually good DB which doesn't rape your disk and CPU by using inefficient lookup methods, em

My point was more that adding RAM isn't to be as good as having an actually good DB which doesn't rape your disk and CPU by using inefficient lookup methods, employing overly broad locks and which fails at transactions. His IO-problem is because he is using a shitty database. Only in the MySQL-world is it common to need the same amount of RAM as the dataset you are working on. And if you are going that way memory-wise, you might as well you use an in-memory flat textfile or persisted objects. I'm not saying having excess RAM for caching is bad, because that is obviously silly, but when you need to have the entire DB in ram, you should realize something is horribly wrong.