It doesn't mean anyone will take any notice (or that it's feasible to get data in and out). Long ago, supporting crystallography, I pointed out that each image

It doesn't mean anyone will take any notice (or that it's feasible to get data in and out). Long ago, supporting crystallography, I pointed out that each image would roughly fit in the cache, and the whole dataset in memory. (On Alphas with ~10MB and 1GiB, I think -- though the storage array was only ~250GB.) The developer of the processing program still didn't see fit to replace the disk-based sort written for a PDP11, which was where the bottleneck was.