[DrSAR]

Isn't information retrieval potentially more costly if you have to search over a larger sea of useless blocks. Certainly is the case in my garage+house where I can now store way more than I ever could in previous stages of my life.

[bob1029]

The root should be locatable in ~constant time. If you use something like the splay tree, the most recently-used/modified/inserted data remains near the hotter side of the log. There is no linear scanning aside from initial bootstrap in an approach like this.

You can search for some comments I made recently about an append-only database scheme.