> Okay. Does this imply that I should see similar SSD read speeds when reading 10 blocks contiguously vs randomly? Yes, with some caveats: 1. Not sure if you

> Okay. Does this imply that I should see similar SSD read speeds when reading 10 blocks contiguously vs randomly? Yes, with some caveats: 1. Not sure if you can read block-aligned data from high-level code. 2. There might be some read-ahead heuristics in the I/O stack. > techniques people have used to incorporate that into the design of their structures? I haven't kept up with the research. You can try searching on scholar.google.com for "I/O-efficient" algorithms and data structures. Also "cache-oblivious". There should be some good surveys now, since this is not a new research area. Note that most of the algorithms that were optimized for disk reads did not typically take into consideration sequential vs random reads. The model simply assumed that reading a block of size B has a unit cost and the performance of algos/ds was expressed in terms of the number of these units.