[wtallis]

The point is that even writing in 8kB chunks will lead to a lot of write amplification when the erase block size is at least 128kB and the flash page size is 16kB. 8kB writes are definitely less bad than 128B writes, but it's still not enough write combining to pass either of the relevant thresholds.

[engendered]

It's a 64x difference. And even that is grossly understating it because most database systems feature write coalescing.

It's actually "ironic" in that database systems were built to avoid random IO because it was glacially slow on spinning rust storage. They do everything possible to avoid it, and in actual, empirical metrics running databases on flash the write amplification has been very low, and hardly mirrors the claims throughout this thread.