Minecraft wiki entry for 0x10c, associated text: For speed and sanity reasons, hardware gets polled 60 times per second (the game tick update interval), and 1/60th of a second was very close to the read time for a sector, so I switched it over to instantly copy an entire second in a game tick. It's a much simpler architecture to implement, and you don't have to worry about partial writes or reads. In the spec, I handwave this away by saying it protects against partial reads and writes, somehow. – Reddit, u/xNotch, October 6, 2012