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Old May 1st 20, 07:57 AM posted to alt.comp.os.windows-10,comp.sys.ibm.pc.hardware.storage
Yousuf Khan[_2_]
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Posts: 1,296
Default Why is this folder so slow?

On 4/27/2020 2:09 PM, Paul wrote:
OK, show me a chunk of nfi.exe output, just
for files in the magical folder. Just enough
to capture the essence of what's going on.


What I'm looking for is filesystem tuning advice, not process tuning
advice. Looking at CPU processes is just a wild goose-chase. Yes, the
CPU is being hammered, but we know which processes are responsible and
why, it's hardly surprising which ones they are (i.e. Macrium Reflect
binaries), so it's trivial.

Anyways, since I'm not getting that advice here, as it turned out, I
just received a new SSD (as an RMA of a previous SSD, which has already
been replaced). I decided to try a few tests myself. I set up the new
SSD as the Z drive, and I formatted it into non-default NTFS settings.
This SSD is usually default formatted to 4K blocks, I tested it out by
using 0.5K and 1K blocks instead. I then restored a previous backup of
the filesystem to this drive, and tested out the backup and restore
performance. Since this is not the production drive, it's not being
accessed by any other processes like Thunderbird, so it's pristine and
not a busy drive.

I found that with both 0.5K and 1K blocks, the restore operation went
very fast, about half an hour to get fully restored, which is a big
improvement (previously used to take 1.5 hours to restore). Also the
allocation slack was greatly improved, went from 1.4GB stored and 2.4GB
allocated (42% slack), to 1.4GB stored and only 1.5GB allocated (7%
slack). However, then I tried backing up the new drive and it still took
over 8 hours! So writing to the drive is getting very fast, but reading
off of it is still slow. Still the same number of files as before, over
half-a-million.

Yousuf Khan