In practice, it's actually fine for most purposes. It's equivalent to multiple striped 15K RPM magnetic disks, which used to be high-end enterprise storage a few years ago.
>It is, yes, but I wouldn't refer to it as comparable to an SSD.
EBS (gp2) is flash based, has far better performance than high end magnetic disks, with excellent latency and consistent performance. So, it's more comparable to SSD than anything else.
>Surprisingly not! Testing in ATTO I got read and write speeds that were almost identical, and a peak of 2000 IOps.
Really? Were you looking at 4K write? Typically that would be under 1 MB/s for an SD card.
So about as many as this SD card, and nothing compared to a real SSD.