> I don't understand the reason for the huge timing difference.
> I have tried defragging the drive first.
> I have even tried overwriting an existing file, after defragging.
> Is this just the nature of drives, does seek time kill me?
> Still seek + latency should be around 10ms + 5ms?  Way less than
> 150ms.
> Do the Win32 write API's suck?

My experience is that Windows services and assorted background processes can
grab system resources at inconvenient times.  I have an ATI video card I use for
video capture, and I try to make sure nothing significant is running if I'm
grabbing video, else it drops frames.


See what task manager shows, and try shutting down everything non-essential
(e.g. web servers, ant-virus, Outlook ...), then run the tests again.


James