Well, it depends on the hard drives you're using, and the exact access pattern, but sequential access to disk can be even faster than random access to RAM.[0] T

Well, it depends on the hard drives you're using, and the exact access pattern, but sequential access to disk can be even faster than random access to RAM.[0] This of course doesn't really matter to average Joe, since he has little influence on how data is read from his disk. But if you're say, a database developer, it does matter quite a bit. [0] http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1536616.1536632 http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1536616.1536632