Comment by 2ion

Yes, most tarballs do not support random access (there are some metadata extensions that allow this). This makes large tarballs annoying to use on systems with slow disk I/O (even a hard disk may be too slow (to the degree of being annoying to work with)). This is by far my biggest gripe with the format. Certainly, smaller tarballs are a very handy format as long as you stay inside the Unixy world of computing – and as long as you keep looking out for the various incompatibilities between the different tar implementations.