Originally posted by abhaysk
The downside is...
OS will always try to allocate, contigious block of Memory on harddisk...and if say while creation of datafile if you give size 2 or more GB, then OS cannot allocate conitigious block to it...rather peices of small blocks will be allocated..

This would have indirect imapct on overall performance of the DB, as its easy to read the Data which is stored as Contigious Block of Memory on harddisk rather than dispersed/scattered blocks of Memory segments.

That is, you are using plain disks and your queries are all using full table scans.

Fortunately so far I have not seen a database running on plain disks (except my PC). If database is running in RAID 0+1 or 5 who cares about random, it´s random by nature in that configuration (so it can use fully the SCSI or Fiber channels)