A certain class of applications will write many large files to a directory in sequence.

A film scanner ingesting video may write each video frame to a separate file. To playback the video frames in realtime its important that these files are contiguous on disk for optimal read-ahead performance by the hardware RAID.

At 24 frames per second, each frame is needed every 40ms, so it is important to keep the disks busy and reading into cache the next frame to be displayed