hm. I wonder if their data access patterns are largely sequential; I imagine the 7200rpm drives would beat the lower-RPM drives in an environment where random access matters.
i have similarly wondered how important drive cache size might be for these types of use cases. multivariate regressions including brand, cache size, rpm etc. as predictors of various performance metrics would be super interesting in a place like blackblaze.
Cache gets you very little if you can feed in sequential data at a constant rate and at the blocksize of the device.
Cache becomes more important as the input data becomes more messy; cache is one tool for turning bursty and random data into constant, sequential data.
