Built upon new data organization and access characteristics, MEMS-based storage devices have come under consideration as an alternative to disks for large data-intensive applications. While not already in commercial production, MEMS-based storage devices have outperformed disks in device-level simulations. Processor-embedded distributed disks improved performance of workloads by offloading application-level processing to the storage. To exploit the potential benefits offered by these emerging storage technologies and offloading models, we propose a processor-embedded distributed MEMS-based storage architecture. Using validated MEMS device models, we evaluate the proposed architecture with representative database and data mining workloads. Our results show that MEMS-based storage improves the overall performance of these workloads over disk-based systems. Furthermore, MEMS-based storage devices transformed the characteristics of several workloads, indicating a shift of performance bottleneck from I/O to the interconnect or processing power of the storage system, which can impact the design points for future storage architectures.