Comment by rkagerer

Before people claim it doesn't matter due to OS write buffering, I should point out a) today's bloated software and the many-layered, abstracted I/O stack it's built on tends to issue lots of unnecessary flushes, b) read latency is just as important as write (if not moreso) to how responsive your OS feels, particularly if the whole thing doesn't fit in (or preload to) memory.