The lag is most likely from the drive going to sleep. I know that the elements drives don't come with a utility to permanently turn off sleep, like the passport drives do. There is also no way to stop it using third party utilities - I tried wdidle & hdparm - they only work on the PC till the power is cut, which makes them useless for Wii use.
Hermes CIOS does something to keep the drive awake. Hold the drive in your hand while just sitting on a menu screen in a game - you can feel the drive spinning up and down. Under Wanin, the drive will just spin down. These drives will likely fail the Mario Kart finish line test - run the game under wanin cios - pause just shy of finishing the race - leave it for a 1/2 hour or so - go back and resume the game - it will hang at the finish line under Wanin, but not Hermes.
Use a drive that supports turning off sleep mode, like a passport SE.
Hermes CIOS does something to keep the drive awake. Hold the drive in your hand while just sitting on a menu screen in a game - you can feel the drive spinning up and down. Under Wanin, the drive will just spin down. These drives will likely fail the Mario Kart finish line test - run the game under wanin cios - pause just shy of finishing the race - leave it for a 1/2 hour or so - go back and resume the game - it will hang at the finish line under Wanin, but not Hermes.
Use a drive that supports turning off sleep mode, like a passport SE.