William Tambe wrote:
Is the delay due to mechanical parts or the electronics gathering the fragments? Would that same delay still apply to a solid state drive? Since a solid state drive is really just a slower version of system memory (Please correct me if I am wrong).
With spinning media,the big cost is moving the physical heads of the drive.With an SSD FLASH-based device, you might also prefer having contiguous writes since flash needs to be erased before the write can happen (and that occurs in chunks). Non-contiguous writes of single sectors would have a high chance of causing extra erasures & read-modify-writes...
ric