> there's no particular penalty for random-access vs. sequential usage This is not really accurate; random access has a penalty compared to sequential access (

> there's no particular penalty for random-access vs. sequential usage This is not really accurate; random access has a penalty compared to sequential access (that's just the physics of it folks™) — the unique characteristic would be that SSDs have more channels*banks than e.g. RAM, which has similar characteristics regarding access patterns. Thus, SSDs achieve close to sequential throughput with large numbers of independent random reads (i.e. high queue depth).