My learnings from optimizing training pipeline to go from 36 steps/minute to 47 steps/minute

Explain Like I'm Normal

A local developer found a way to boost training speeds by 30% on standard hard drives by packing small dataset files into compressed blobs. This approach minimizes disk seek times by allowing the hardware to read data sequentially rather than jumping around the disk. It is a massive win for builders working with large audio or image datasets on consumer-grade hardware.