[Wavytone]

The greater problem in Windows is disk fragmentation.

With spinning media the ideal is to have a file written to consecutive disk sectors so that as the disk rotates the file is read sector by sector as the disk rotates, with zero waiting in between. When the drive is frganmented, a file is written to one block here, another block there and quite possibly the CU has to wait for the best part of a rotation of the platter to get to the next block in the sequence. On a 7200 rpm drive that could be 140 microseconds waiting between blocks. Repeat for say 1000 blocks and thats a 1.4 second delay which is significant.

However, with spinning rust the read/write time is fundamentally limited by the rotation rate of the platter.

Best thing you can do is eliminate the problem entirely by installing an SSD (no spinning media). The next best is to use a RAID array of multiple drives, though you had better have a robust backup strategy. The zero-cost option is to defragment the drive regularly, but it won't achieve much of an improvement.