Agree, that sentence doesn't make sense. But I think the point is simply that accessing data doesn't have any overhead, so you benchmarking your disks. Given the design, that seems likely.

> Also - what's the protection mechanism for files? If there is none, I literally have no idea what the purpose of this FS is. Under what circumstances would I need a giant slow data storage tier that has no redundancy to speak of?

Caches, that's what makes me interested in this (having to cache lots of images). We're using mogilefs for this currently.