People should also know for writes that there are a variety of ways to mitigate this. The first way is to write sequentially (no seeking). The second way is to

People should also know for writes that there are a variety of ways to mitigate this. The first way is to write sequentially (no seeking). The second way is to install battery backed write cache which will do this for you. If you're ok with losing a little bit of data you can also just have the OS write to memory before flushing to disk. BBWC controllers seem to handle write reorder optimization much better than the OS. So I'd recommend the BBWC over writing to memory. This is a large reason I dislike cloud hosting, most of the hardware is crap and you could get much better performance from it with a little more expense. Also it's mostly pointless to bother making your writes sequential as the performance degrades to random IO because of all the other instances on the machine.