On Thu, 18 Apr 2002, mlw wrote: > The days when "head movement" is relevant are long over. Not a single drive > sold today, or in the last 5 years, is a simple spindle/head system. .... > The assumption that sequentially reading a file from a modern disk drive means > that the head will move less often is largely bogus.
Well, oddly enough, even with the head moving just as often, sequential I/O has always been much faster than random I/O on every drive I've owned in the past five years. So I guess I/O speed doesn't have a lot to do with head movement or something. Some of my drives have started to "chatter" quite noisily during random I/O, too. I thought that this was due to the head movement, but I guess not, since they're quite silent during sequential I/O. BTW, what sort of benchmarking did you do to determine that the head movement is similar during random and sequential I/O on drives in the last five years or so? cjs -- Curt Sampson <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> +81 90 7737 2974 http://www.netbsd.org Don't you know, in this new Dark Age, we're all light. --XTC ---------------------------(end of broadcast)--------------------------- TIP 6: Have you searched our list archives? http://archives.postgresql.org
