The scale of multimedia data collections is expanding at a very fast rate. In order to cope with this growth, the high-dimensional indexing methods used for content-based multimedia retrieval must adapt gracefully to secondary storage. Recent progress in storage technology, however, means that algorithm designers must now cope with a spectrum of secondary storage solutions, ranging from traditional magnetic hard drives to state-of-the-art solid state disks. We study the impact of storage technology on a simple, prototypical high-dimensional indexing method for large scale query processing. We show that while the algorithm implementation deeply impacts the performance of the indexing method, the choice of underlying storage technology is equally important.