Expectations on copy speed

[xochi]

If the bottleneck is in writing tons of small files and the problem is really due to drive head seek speed, is there any way to speed it up? Can you do the copies using a mode that says "it's ok to cache small file writes on the destination drive?" I know in some cases you can tell the OS whether you must have the file written to disk now, or if it's ok to cache it for a bit...? Not sure if this would help at all.