Don Thomson is one of the co-founders and lead developer of  the former Accpac Internationl now Sage Accpac ERP. An insightful blog article from Don is is referenced here:

Today’s press releases, such as “MySpace dumps server hard disks for flash drives” may not seem to have any relationship with Accpac. It does. If you follow certain lines of reasoning, flash drives could mean massively faster performance characteristics for Accpac.

Use of solid state technology (flash drives) is another example of a sea-change in the software industry being driven by iPod users’ insatiable demand for more storage. The personal computer (IT) industry no longer drives storage technology. It is all about iPods capable of storing more music and more movies – using solid state (flash drive) technology.

You may say that new technology is also driving down hard drive prices. Yes, you can get a terabyte drive for a few hundred dollars. Who uses tape backup systems anymore? Just kidding – half of our customers still do. But Accpac users don’t typically need a terabyte. Many of our clients run Accpac quite happily with 2Gb or 4Gb or 10Gb databases. Hello – you can buy a 16Gb flash drive for less than $200. Okay, MySpace is not using $200 data-sticks – but the technology is the same.

Why has MySpace switched to solid state? They have a need-for-speed. Rather than bulking up on RAM caches for their databases, why not just have faster solid state storage? The RAM can only really speed up queries – database updates still need to be “written through” to non-volatile storage – and at some point, a larger cache means slower, not faster performance. Does it make sense to have 16Gb of RAM for a 4Gb database?

How much faster could Accpac be in a flash drive configuration? It could be a lot – as well as hardware transfer speed and latency, there is another line of reasoning based on relational database optimization strategies. Times are changing and it’s always fun to watch”

Source: Thomson, Don. “Faster Accpac Performance.” donthomson.wordpress.com October 20, 2009.