Sorry for the sheer simplicity of this question.  A rather obtuse performance bottleneck has boiled down to this very small query.  I have done some empirical analysis and I think I might be getting victimized by disk caching strategies.  Fundamentally (if disk caching were disabled) would writing a file be as fast, slower, or faster than reading a file?  I would assume that the answer would depend on the fragmentation (and file size) but the operation to write a file would have to do an additional look up of where the next free block is rather than just following the pointer to it.  Any insight is appreciated.
Is reading a file on UNIX faster than writing a file?
files;filesystems;hard disk