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you have to rewrite a whole block to modify a bit

Technically, you can change bits from 1 => 0; you need to erase a whole block to go from 0 => 1.



All the harder to optimize for -- you could make the bitmasks in the on-disk format inverted, but it wouldn't help any given that you're almost always going to modify an integer at the same time. I suppose you could use unary representations :)

Another related (and potentially conflicting) optimization would be for powersaving -- in solid state logic, boolean values are represented as 'low' and 'high', and since 'high' costs more power (and nand gates plentiful), many circuits get implemented in negative logic. That could mean that an on-disk format and it's inversion would have different power consumption!




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