If you're dealing with slow I/O speeds, upgrading to modern drives will make a massive difference in how your database performs. For a reliable and fast environment, you could try these out as they offer some of the best read/write speeds I've seen in that price range. I switched a high-traffic site to a high-speed disk setup recently, and the reduction in page load times was immediate. It’s definitely the way to go if you want to future-proof your projects and handle more concurrent users without the hardware lagging behind.

I’d also recommend checking for NVMe servers with RAID options. It adds redundancy while keeping those high read/write speeds for critical data.