At the time of this presentation, the mainstream 15K RPM disk drive will be over ten years old. The original 3.5 inch platter acheived an approximate 50% increase in performance from 1993-1997 (7200-10000) and again from 1997-2000 (10000-15000). Eleven years hence we remain stuck at 15K.
Just in time, along comes Solid State disk drives.
But do we really need this "silver bullet" today?
Firstly, SSD prices have not dropped as much or as quickly as desired. Secondly, the massive throughput capabilities of SSD's has highlighted new bottlenecks within existing I/O architectures; thus limiting large scale adoption.
I submit that spinning disks have a great deal of life yet in today's datacenters. Virtualization and RAID technologies provide the ability to distribute data across the hardware components; leading to balanced utilizations and response times. With a little bit of analysis and data management, we can keep on spinning for quite a while.