I've noticed that the disk i/o performance of our mac minis (Macmini3,1: 2.26GHz C2D with 2GB ram and a 160GB 5400rpm drive) is rather slow. In particular, the FlushBuffersFile system call seems to be exceedingly slow, taking nearly 100ms in some cases. This seems specific to Windows 7, as the numbers on the same machine running equivalent code on Linux aren't nearly as bad (nor are they nearly as bad on different machines running Windows 7).
I've checked the configuration, and everything seems in order. DMA is enabled. Write caching is enabled. I did notice that turning off "windows write cache buffer flushing" made everything extremely fast (but obviously all that's doing is making FlushBuffersFile a no-op)
I'm beginning to suspect that this might have something to do with the default disk configuration set up bootcamp, but I'm not sure. Has anyone had similar problems? If so, did you come up with any solution?
A bit more information on the specifics of our problem and test case available here:
