"Mum" has it spot on, as usual. I teach advanced server performance tuning, and the first thing I ask new students is "what's the fastest way to get from London to Glasgow ?" (I live in UK). Answer: don't go to Glasgow, have a video call instead. In IT you can't make the hardware go faster (e.g. if a disk spins round at 10,000rpm, that's what it does, no amount of blowing on it will make it spin round faster) so the only way to "speed up" disk IOs is … you can't. You have to eliminate some of them. Just like Mum's Paypal account.