It's notable that 'time to read/write entire device' has been creeping up for any storage device you can buy off the shelf for the past ~40 years.
replyReading a floppy disk took around 30 secs for example. A whole CD took 5 mins. My whole 1TB SSD takes 10 mins.
Interesting, this is my first time consciously thinking about this trend.
replyPerhaps the needs for read/write speed are bounded (before processor, etc. becomes the limiting factor), while more capacity is only limited by price. Or maybe increasing density of storage inherently means a tradeoff with I/O speed (AFAIK, NAND flash needs to rewrite lots of data just to make a single write? Atom-scale interactions have side effects)
A modern hard drive (36TB @ 280MB/s) can take more than a day. If you treat a bank of tapes as one device this can get even more extreme.
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