> HDDs also have a spinning medium and a read head , so the optimization is similar to optical media like CDs.
HDDs also have to real with fragmentation, I wonder what the odds that you get to write 150 GBs (and then regular updates in the 30GB range) without breaking it into fragments...
Microsoft has a paper somewhere that shows IO speed starts to drop when fragments of files get below 64MB. So you can split that file up into a few thousand pieces without much performance loss at all.
HDDs also have to real with fragmentation, I wonder what the odds that you get to write 150 GBs (and then regular updates in the 30GB range) without breaking it into fragments...