[presumably the empty-disk effect could also be achieved by partitioning, say 
25% of the drive for the database, and 75% empty partition.  But in fact, you 
could use that "low performance 75%" for rarely-used or static data, such as 
the output from pg_dump, that is written during non-peak times] 
 
Larry Ellison financed a  company called Pillar Data Systems which was founded 
on the principle that you can tier the disk according to the value and 
performance requirements of the data. They planned to put  the most valuable in 
performance terms on the outside of  SATA disks  and use the empty space in the 
middle for  slower stuff..
(This is not an advert. I like the idea but I dont know if it works well and I 
dont have anything to do with Pillar  other than EnterpriseDB compete against 
Larry's other little company).   
Probably the way to go is flash drives for primary performance data . EMC and 
others have announced   Enterprise Flash Drives  (they claim 30 times 
performance of 15K disks  although at 30 times the cost of standard disk today 
). Flash should also have pretty much consistent high performance across the 
whole capacity.
Within a couple of years EFD  should be affordable for mainstream use.

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