From: Randy Appleton (randy@ms.uky.edu)
Date: 12/02/92 

From: randy@ms.uky.edu (Randy Appleton)
Subject: Re: Why are hard disk reads so much slower than writes?
Date: Wed, 2 Dec 1992 06:34:48 GMT

oles@spectra.eng.hawaii.edu (Shawn Oles) writes:

>I recently ran some similar tests and was suprised to find this as well.
>On my 20MHZ 386 I was seeing 150K/sec reads and 200K/sec writes when
>accessing a newly formated Minix file system.

Here is a suggestion. If these writes are writing to parts of the
file not yet created, then directory information must also be updated
onto the disk. This causes additional disk accesses, and slows things
down. Were these writes to part of the file not yet created?