I found this article over at linux-mag.com talking about how performance might be boosted on mass storage devices or harddrives in the near future.  I say might becuase it’s highly likely that something else will come out to leap frog what we know about today.  With the migration of Memory Managers/Controllers to the CPU die the next big leap in performance should be in disk technology.  This article and several others I have been reading lately seem to be pointing to hybrid SSD/Magnetic Disk media drives very soon.  Another strong contender is a what’s old is new again idea of using volitale RAM as a storage media.  With the new lower power consuming memory and higher capacity capicitors the idea may be reaching a tipping point where it’s both cost effective and safe to do.  We won’t know for some time what companies like Western Digital and Seagate have been working on but they have been relatively quite for a while now and are due for something really big soon.  Faster disks always means faster Linux systems that can better meet the needs of business for the data intensive apps around Busness Intelligence and other data centric buzz words.