this post was submitted on 17 Dec 2024
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[–] ricecake@sh.itjust.works 12 points 1 day ago

Additionally, most media is read in a contiguous scan. Streaming media is very much not random access.

Your typical access pattern is going to be seeking to a chunk, reading a few megabytes of data in a row for the streaming application to buffer, and then moving on. The ~10ms of access time at the start are next to irrelevant. Particularly when you consider that the OS has likely observed that you have unutilized RAM and loads the entire file into the memory cache to bypass the hard drive entirely.