init observations

[Jeff Spaleta]

On 11/16/05, Stephen J. Smoogen <smooge at gmail.com> wrote:
> A lot of commodity disk-drives are sub-par on these areas. This means
> that programs will slow down because you are spending a lot of time
> waiting for the disk-drive to give you bits because it keeps plugging
> up its cache or not able to get various items off disk as fast as
> advertised.

Is there some reasonably valid understanding of how big an impact this
makes in the average and worst case? Sort of a measure of the spread
of disk-drive performance out in the wild.
Say for example...a typical christmas special home desktop from
Dell... does the disk-seek performance on a system like that make an
order of magnitude faster bootup or application startup times a
pipedream?

-jef