I’m guessing that only works if the file is smaller than the RAM cache of the drives. Transfer a file that’s bigger than that, and it will go fast at first, but then fill the cache and the rate starts to drop closer to 100 MB/s.
My data hoarder drives are a pair of WD ultrastar 18TB SAS drives on RAID1, and that’s how they tend to behave.
This is for very long sustained writes, like 40TiB at a time. I can’t say I’ve ever noticed any slowdown, but I’ll keep a closer eye on it next time I do another huge copy. I’ve also never seen any kind of noticeable slowdown on my 4 8TB SATA WD golds, although they only get to about 150MB/s each.
EDIT: The effect would be obvious pretty fast at even moderate write speeds, I’ve never seen a drive with more than a GB of cache. My 16TB drives have 256MB, and the 8TB drives only 64MB of cache.
