A long time ago, diskless Unix machines were all therage. These days, they've all but vanished (although theylive on in some specialized applications, such as LTSP ). Frommy perspective, what made diskless machines lose out is threefold:performance issues, cheap disks, and complexity. Of these, the realkiller issue was complexity.

The hard core of the performance issues is not so much how fast asingle machine could access its 'disks' (although this should not beunderestimated itself)