5 ms·
This isn't necessarily true. A file is divided into 4096-byte "pages" on disk, I think. Each page can be stored in a different physical location, completely d
by palish 15y ago
This isn't necessarily true.
A file is divided into 4096-byte "pages" on disk, I think. Each page can be stored in a different physical location, completely disjoint from one another. So you would have to wait while the harddrive seeks the correct location. (Or get an SSD.)
However that's probably a pedantic observation.
- Scaevolus 15y agoThey're called sectors, not pages. You're describing worst-case fragmentation, which filesystems work very hard to prevent. In general, the fastest thing to read off a disk is a single large file, assuming minimal fragmentation. Even SSDs have much better sequential read performance compared to random-access.