It's definitely that one

Reminds me of that story about Windows's format dialog. It's on Xitter, so here's the text:

Dave W Plummer

I wrote [Windows's] Format dialog back on a rainy Thursday morning at Microsoft in late 1994, I think it was.

We were porting the bajillion lines of code from the Windows95 user interface over to NT, and Format was just one of those areas where WindowsNT was different enough from Windows95 that we had to come up with some custom UI.

I got out a piece of paper and wrote down all the options and choices you could make with respect to formatting a disk, like filesystem, label, cluster size, compression, encryption, and so on.

Then I busted out VC++2.0 and used the Resource Editor to lay out a simple vertical stack of all the choices you had to make, in the approximate order you had to make. It wasn't elegant, but it would do until the elegant UI arrived.

That was some 30 years ago, and the dialog is still my temporary one from that Thursday morning, so be careful about checking in "temporary" solutions!

I also had to decide how much "cluster slack" would be too much, and that wound up constraining the format size of a FAT volume to 32GB. That limit was also an arbitrary choice that morning, and one that has stuck with us as a permanent side effect.

So remember... there are no "temporary" checkins :)

yeah a fresh windows 11 install has like 20 different control panels, all built at different times by different teams using different UI toolkits. It's basically their philosophy to not unify anything but instead just keep bolting new things to different pieces of the OS, no matter how similar

Might have been at the same time even

Yes that was the old Microsoft. The new Microsoft has fixed that problem All teams share the same design philosophy. >!Enshitification!<

I use AMD, but thank you.

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.

People who say this I'll tell you what actually happens so you can know. When you tell it to safely eject all the volatile memory saved in RAM it actually writes to the permenant storage memory instead of holding it in volatile storage. Every time you yank you're betting that its not in volatile storage anymore and was written to storage. That's what safely eject does, forces the CPU to write to permenant storage.

Edit: the problem comes from whats doing what at what time and you will see why you can lose everything.

I don't think an average user is going to know how to interpret the output of mount or findmt

sound a lot better than on windows, at least for power user.

So a complicated set of terminal commands and alternatives you need to have memorized ahead of time. That's definitely the linux solution. You can do it, but no average user would ever be able to when they need it.

Windows probably has some equally complicated way of finding what is locking a file/folder... or you can just install File Locksmith which is a Microsoft PowerToys tool, and just have it in the context menu everywhere.

Writes are asynchronous on Linux.

Unless I mount it with sync, which I wish would be default for non-system drives (which are going to be in fstab anyway). I didn't notice any difference, aside from the lack of guessing when the magic is over. 2GiB goes into black hole, now what?

Macintosh Killed My Inner Child

By default Windows disables file caching on external USB drives. It should be writing those files directly. That doesn't prevent a program from locking a file or folder that it is using though.

Thats bad practice though, external drives in Linux should be mounted with no write caching just like they are in windows.