Vista - very slow hard drive write speed

I have an internal Seagate SATA drive that has a good read speed and a
terrible write speed. If I write small files to the drive, Windows reports
that the transfer rate is less than 1MB/sec. Large files have a high speed of
about 13MB/sec. I have enabled write caching and advanced performance in the
hardware tab. I don't think that my antivirus is the problem, because the
drive's read speed is great.

The Windows Experience Index rates my hard drive at 5.5, but I feel that the
drive is the slowest part of the system.

I see on websites that hard drives generally have write speeds that are
40MB/sec and higher.

Does anyone have a suggestion about how to increase the write speed of the
drive?

Observed speeds are normally slower since they include the time for the
drive to physically seek to the location to be written to before the actual
transfer from the drives cache to its physical platters can occur. If there
is any other disk activity taking place the drives heads may need to reseek
to the proper location on each transfer. A small file obviously will always
include at least one seek since the heads will never be at the location that
the small file is to be written at.
"sigmund" <sigmund@xxxxxx> wrote in message
news:01044C47-7CC9-49DA-A72F-CC4763C42EB2@xxxxxx

First, be careful comparing speeds. Some sites/utilities are reporting
megaBITS per second (these would generally be the drive manufacturer sites
where they want to put on big numbers to evoke big responses) but Windows
and many other measurement tools report megaBYTES per second where the total
speed would be 1/8th of the speed reported in megaBITS per second.

Second, copying files with Explorer is the most inefficient way to do so and
will always report a slower speed than the maximum possible speed. That's
why drive speed tests use direct reads/writes to the drive to rate speed
rather than file copies.

Finally, yes, the hard drive is the slowest part of your computer (with the
potential exception of a CD/DVD drive) and always will be. It's been that
way since day 1 of Windows computing because the hard drive is indeed the
slowest I/O device you use every day. You can wring a little more
performance out of the hard drive system by using faster drives (SATA II or
SCSI drives) or by getting drives with a faster RPM speed or a larger
cache - but in the end we're talking about small fractions of a second
improvement for large fractions of your paycheck. :-)

--
Richard G. Harper [MVP Shell/User] rgharper@xxxxxx
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"sigmund" <sigmund@xxxxxx> wrote in message
news:01044C47-7CC9-49DA-A72F-CC4763C42EB2@xxxxxx