We aren't there yet, not by a long shot. Taking clock cycles as the base factor, a disk seek on a modern drive (8ms seek, 4GHz CPU) takes 32 million cycles. On the Cray1's 80MHz CPU, 32 million cycles is 400ms which would be really quick for a robot.
Tape seek times (for half a tape) are closer to 40s, which is still 100x more. We'll have to wait a while yet before disk is the new tape in terms of cost of seeks, even when comparing the 70s to today.
That's only considering latency. The cost consideration is a completely different story.
Tape seek times (for half a tape) are closer to 40s, which is still 100x more. We'll have to wait a while yet before disk is the new tape in terms of cost of seeks, even when comparing the 70s to today.
That's only considering latency. The cost consideration is a completely different story.