It's interesting how similar that is to the type of optimizations gamedevs do today. E.g. sub out "floppy disk sector" for GPU memory and crank up the numbers a few orders of magnitude.
It's not just gamedevs. I/O buffering remains an important source of both performances and frustrations (when the I/O is buffered a bit too heavily and nothing appears in the output because in-memory buffers are still filling), and most modern languages provide buffering wrappers or even buffer file I/O by default.