@nprofile1q... I think you're missing a digit... I understand when you say random access you mean accounting for seek latency assuming it has to do a lot of seeking, but I don't think even the slowest harddrives are less than 30MB/s assuming you're running a semi-vaguely-modern-ish-ish-ish OS (or smartdrv if you're in dos.) I mean unless you manually rig it so that every single sector of a file is spread all the way across the drive from each other sector or something, but you basically would have to do this on purpose... Even if you never defrag it is almost impossible to reach that stage.

These days it's not unusual to get 60 or sometimes even 90MB/s from a good quality harddrive under normal conditions.

Also games usually package data which can make seeking and caching work better