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Cache miss latency was the first thing that popped into my mind as well when I saw the title.

It seems like they don't make a clear distinction between latency and bandwidth. From the little I know on SSDs(don't claim to be an expert here) the sequential reads are below or on-par with high spindle speed disks.

What seems to be a better take-away would be that sequencing of your reads isn't nearly as important as it used to be. Back in games we'd duplicate data across a DVD so that we could do "seekfree" loading where duplicating 5-10MB of data would mean just a single big call to read() and gain massive load time performance.



SSDs are still faster than hard disks even with sequential reads. 15,000 rpm enterprise spinning disks read at about 260 MB/s [1] while NVMe SSDs (like those in a 2015 MacBook Pro) reads at >1300 MB/s [2].

[1]: http://www.tomshardware.com/charts/enterprise-hdd-charts/-02...

[2]: http://www.computerworld.com/article/2900330/apple-mac/holy-...


> NVMe SSDs (like those in a 2015 MacBook Pro) reads at >1300 MB/s [2].

No joke. Just got an new MBP for work. Before had a spinning disk (well hybrid). Was running some silly benchmarks that I ran before and clocked my disk throughput at about 100MB/s. On MBP got 800MB/s. I thought something broke (was hitting page cache or some trickery like that) or didn't compile things right. But no, tried other tools, looked online and it seemed correct. It really surprised me.


> From the little I know on SSDs(don't claim to be an expert here) the sequential reads are below or on-par with high spindle speed disks.

Not quite, but they're "only" a 2-5 times faster, not orders of magnitude faster, as with random accesses.




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