> This is not necessarially true. Testing with modern 7200 RPM IBM IDE
> drives on a UDMA-100 controller, I found that sequential reads and
> writes were basically unaffected. I.e., with one drive I got about 30
> MB/sec; with two drives on the same controller I got about 30 MB/sec
> from each, when being read or written simultaneously.
>
> What *was* affected was the number of disk transactions I could get
> per second; with one disk or two, I could do no more than about 90
> transactions per second. So if you do a lot of small reads and writes,

with unix this is often more important than linear read speed.