I don’t fucking know why I can’t eject USB hard drives. I installed the SysInternals apps, and best they can tell me is that Dropbox is fucking with the drives. I explicitly told Dropbox to not fuck with USB drives. I don’t know who’s lying, I just want whoever is fucking with the drives to stop fucking with the drives, OK??? OK.
“Fun” fact: if you think it’s slow normally (and to be fair, it is), NTFS seems to have a pathological performance regression when a directory contains more than 10,000 children, any operations on files in that directory slow down by around 95%.
I discovered this on our CCTV system at work (that runs on Windows Server 2022), which creates an inordinate number of small files (each containing at most a few seconds of video). It was causing some of its periodic maintenance tasks to fail, as they’d take longer to run than than the configured interval between them.
Windows also really doesn’t like dealing with half-petabyte filesystems, just like… at all.
I can also tell you that if you are working with file numbers in the 10,000, windows will notoriously interfere with their built-in services. When copying or moving, msdefender might delay every file copy because it marks the action as suspicious and begins scanning the files beforehand. And also the trkwrks or however that drive observation service is called may block actions on specific files just because.
In short, you are not only fighting drive formats at that point, you are also fighting your built-in system services. Source: I wanna die.
And yet they use that fs for their little winsxs trick with 10’000’s of child dirs.
NewTechnology File SystemIt’s new compared to FAT!
(of 1995)