The speedup would be well worth it by being able to tell the mmc to move 100 bytes from position 20000 to position 40000 instead of give me 8 bytes from position 200000 then check evry one of the bytes then ask the mmc again give me 8 bytes from position 20008 and so on.

If I got to chose in this day and age I would define a c string/array as a pointer to a long int and after the long int we have or data.