Quote Originally Posted by Cyanide
when reading a data set that has recently been used (not necessarily the previous data set), loading time is around 1s.

- How come?
- Are these files in some kind of cache?
- Since the hard drive cache is 16MB I would not expect several hundred MB of files to be in the disk cache.
- Is there some other kind of cache around that helps improving the reading speed?
The HD has a cache itself, and it's possible the OS does buffering too.

is this the best way to do it or is there any other faster command to read lots of data?
There's an overloaded FileStream constructor that takes a 'FileOption' as a parameter. Setting FileOptions.SequentialScan may improve performance as the OS can use that as a hint that it should buffer the file.