It's hard to say. A single-threaded import might not be saturating any particular hardware component; there's other overhead in the work. And when you account

It's hard to say. A single-threaded import might not be saturating any particular hardware component; there's other overhead in the work. And when you account for multiple CPUs and multi-disk RAID arrays, the picture gets more complicated. InnoDB journals data. It's writing the data sequentially and then later arranging it to the correct place, which will also be sequential by primary key. So if you're loading in a bunch of sequential chunks in parallel, I imagine InnoDB can probably order the final B-Tree writes so that they also end up being sequential, even if the initial writes to its logfile ended up being interleaved.