Definitely could be a factor; I know of a programmer who works at a Dutch company that mainly does ports of AAA games (he may be on here too, hello!), he once w

Definitely could be a factor; I know of a programmer who works at a Dutch company that mainly does ports of AAA games (he may be on here too, hello!), he once wrote a comment or forum post about how he developed an algorithm to put data on a disk in the order that it was needed to minimize disk seeks. Spinny disks benefit greatly from reading data linearly.