287 MB/s vs 816 MB/s is huge. Linode is really doing a good job here. I have 4 VMs with them and am very happy. Can't wait to make this move.
I upgraded some of my VMs and they all failed to boot on their own and I had to manually boot each one after the migration.
[root@server ~]# dd bs=1M count=1024 if=/dev/zero of=test conv=fdatasync
1024+0 records in
1024+0 records out
1073741824 bytes (1.1 GB) copied, 6.29244 s, 171 MB/s 287 MB/sec / $5 ~ 57 MB/sec/dollar
816 MB/sec / $20 ~ 40 MB/sec/dollar 287 MB/sec / $20 ~ 14 MB/sec/dollar
I don't think MB/sec/dollar makes sense simply because disk speed does not scale. If you need a (very) fast disk, Linode is obviously the better choice.