New Technology File System

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.

Have you tried turning off thumbnails? In my experience when it slows down on large directories like that it's either trying to generate thumbnails or index a bunch of new files (which is also a possibility in your use case)

And yet they use that fs for their little winsxs trick with 10'000's of child dirs.

I literally cannot understand how Outlook is so awful and unpleasant to use. Constant pauses, regular freezes and a search that will show a document I sent to myself five years ago regardless of search terms but won't surface the perfect match I received yesterday, in the world's most prominent email client.

The only worse software I have to interact with on a daily basis is Adobe's PDF reader, which gives me five popups within one minute of opening it and takes over a minute to do a text search in a five page document.

I copied 400GB of assorted files in an RDP session today and Windows had to think for a minute or two, then copy them ever so slowly, then stop at 99% done, then crash Explorer and disable the start menu and taskbar and CTRL-ALT-DEL and all ways of getting to the Task Manager, and then freeze the whole machine so that I had to travel to the physical machine and hold down the power button, since when it has been unusably slow because Windows now wants to rebuild the RAID array, which takes days. This was a pretty average Windows session.

Moving files to the recycle bin and deleting files should take the same amount of time, both are essentially just a rewrite of the pointer to the data and don't copy any data at all.