Seconding the EBS Raid0 option. Some comparison here http://blog.mudy.info/2009/04/disk-io-ec2-vs-mosso-vs-linode/ http://blog.mudy.info/2009/04/disk-io-ec2-vs-

Seconding the EBS Raid0 option. Some comparison here http://blog.mudy.info/2009/04/disk-io-ec2-vs-mosso-vs-linode/ http://blog.mudy.info/2009/04/disk-io-ec2-vs-mosso-vs-linode... Also, if you have a part of a DB that just requires unholy amounts IO, there is of course the new 68gig instances, move that part and run it purely on memory with a combination of frequent dumps to disk.