Unfortunately, it is very easy to see the cost of the new SSD, not so in term of manpower. I would not be surprised if many companies will choose the "more enginering" part because the bureaucracy has made this kind of tradeoff impossible to make.
This. The development department is usually a fixed cost and budgeted for while new purchases are not. SSD:s were actually quite expensive at the time, I think it cost about 10k USD or something.
Interesting.... I may be the edge case, but in my experience, the tendency is usually for the boss to be more comfortable spending money for a solution that will solve the money than burning developer time on a project that may or may not fix the problem and mare or may not be on time.
That works if you have a boss who is competent and if you don't work in big companies. That's exactly the kind of things which make small companies inherently more efficient, IMO.
