HD performances: what'd be expected?

Hello

When burning a CD or DVD, a drive doesn't write the data directly from the hard drive. Data has to be written at a constant rate, but the speed it comes from the hard drive can be variable, so the drive copies data into a buffer first. A buffer is a region of memory which can be used to temporarily hold data. A drive's buffer size (sometimes called cache size) is the amount of data it can store in preparation for writing to a disc.

and secondly

There are usually two types of disk caching:

    * Read Cache - Allows the hard disk to read data ahead in the background, so the application doesn't have to block while waiting for the data to be read, but gets the data delivered from the cache instead.
    * Write Cache - Allows the hard disk to lazy write data in the background, so the application doesn't have to block while waiting for the data to be written, but enters the cache where it is later written to the hard disk.

Disk caching greatly improves disk performance, but there is a drawback to Write caching, as anything written to the cache, which haven't been flushed to the disk will be lost when the power is lost. Most applications are aware of this behavior, and the operating system provides the ability to perform a direct write or flushed write. Write flushing means that the application will wait for the data to be written to disk before continuing, instead of just writing to the cache which completes right away.

There are three levels of disk caching:

Hard disk Cache

Disk controller Cache

Operating System Cache

So its normal and nothing is to worry

Regards