Jim Gray wrote a classic paper about this. "The 5 Minute Rule for Trading Memory for Disc Accesses and the 5 Byte Rule for Trading Memory for CPU Time". http://

Jim Gray wrote a classic paper about this. "The 5 Minute Rule for Trading Memory for Disc Accesses and the 5 Byte Rule for Trading Memory for CPU Time". http://www.hpl.hp.com/techreports/tandem/TR-86.1.pdf http://www.hpl.hp.com/techreports/tandem/TR-86.1.pdf There is an updated version that also talks about SSDs. http://cacm.acm.org/magazines/2009/7/32091-the-five-minute-rule-20-years-later/fulltext http://cacm.acm.org/magazines/2009/7/32091-the-five-minute-r...