Get attributes of all files under a directory while accessing the directory only

Question

I'm trying to write a function in C# that gets a directory path as parameter and returns a dictionary where the keys are the files directly under that directory and the values are their last modification time. This is easy to do with Directory.GetFiles() and then File.GetLastWriteTime(). However, this means that every file must be accessed, which is too slow for my needs. Is there a way to do this while accessing just the directory? Does the file system even support this kind of requirement?

Edit, after reading some answers: Thank you guys, you are all saying pretty much the same - use FileInfo object. Still, it is just as slow to use Directory.GetFiles() (or Directory.EnumerateFiles()) to get those objects, and I suspect that getting them requires access to every file. If the file system keeps last modification time of its files in the files themselves only, there can't be a way to extract that info without file access. Is this the case here? Do GetFiles() and EnumerateFiles() of DirectoryInfo access every file or get their info from the directory entry? I know that if I would have wanted to get just the file names, I could do this with the Directory class without accessing every file. But getting attributes seems trickier...

Edit, following henk's response: it seems that it really is faster to use FileInfo Object. I created the following test:

static void Main(string[] args)
    {
        Console.WriteLine(DateTime.Now);

        foreach (string file in Directory.GetFiles(@"\\169.254.78.161\dir"))
        {
            DateTime x = File.GetLastWriteTime(file);
        }

        Console.WriteLine(DateTime.Now);

        DirectoryInfo dirInfo2 = new DirectoryInfo(@"\\169.254.78.161\dir");
        var files2 = from f in dirInfo2.EnumerateFiles()
                select f;
        foreach (FileInfo file in files2)
        {
            DateTime x = file.LastWriteTime;
        }

        Console.WriteLine(DateTime.Now);
    }

For about 800 files, I usually get something like:
31/08/2011 17:14:48
31/08/2011 17:14:51
31/08/2011 17:14:52

Answer 1

The only other thing I can think of is using the FileInfo-Class. As far as I can see this might help you or it might read the file as well (Read Permissions are required)

Answer 2

I didn't do any timings but your best bet is:

DirectoryInfo di = new DirectoryInfo(myPath);
FileInfo[] files = di.GetFiles();

I think all the FileInfo attributes are available in the directory file records so this should (could) require the minimum I/O.