One trick I used to use is to put a small read/write cache in front of file operations. I would usually pick something like the size of a sector or cluster. W

One trick I used to use is to put a small read/write cache in front of file operations. I would usually pick something like the size of a sector or cluster. Windows is pretty bad at small writes, and mearly 'ok' at reads because you usually can just get away with the windows file store cache in that case. I came across the write cache bit accidently when trying to minimize wear on an embedded flash device. It was borderline I thought I had done something wrong. Minimizing open/close and keeping your reads/writes close to sector/cluster size on many filesystems can produce some very nice results. As you can minimize the context switches from user space to kernel. In the case of adding in a 'db' layer packing probably helps as well as slack on small files is huge percentage wise of the total file. So you would be more likely to hit the file cache as well as any in built ones for your stack.