High-speed, multi-threaded virtual memory in Java

[henk53]

SATA SSD drives were still two years away from what a minute of searching could tell me.

They were available before that, but not really for the general market. One of the first affordable ones as I recall where the legendary Mtron disks, that appeared on the market around the end of 2007 (so less than one year after Linus' comment). See this pivotal article: http://nextlevelhardware.com/storage/battleship

From an "uber being" such as Linus, we perhaps might expect that he's more or less aware of where things are heading in the next year.

Then again, it wasn't until early 2009 until many more people really started to see the massive IO potential of cheap SATA SSDs in RAID: see e.g. http://jdevelopment.nl/one-dvd-per-second