Do you have any benchmarks illustrating the difference?

Benchmarks? No. That's just my personal experience with different computers. (And by the way, the faster than SSDs claim does not include startup time.)

Can one still benchmark Windows? Most proprietary software requires explicit authorization from the seller nowadays. (I'm quite certain those clauses are illegal here, it's not because of it that I didn't benchmark, but I expect to find none on the web because of it.)

> Can one still benchmark Windows? Most proprietary software requires explicit authorization from the seller nowadays.

Yes, you can still find Windows benchmarks, they're all over the web in fact. The Phoronix test suite supports Windows for example, and Phoronix have a whole series comparing performance between Windows and various Linux distributions: https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=search&q=Windows%20vs.

They've also tested NTFS vs. other file systems before, although this was using the Linux NTFS driver: https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Linux-4....

More recently they did at least one I/O bound test with Windows vs Linux, a SQLite insertion test: https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=windows-... Linux + EXT4 crushed Windows + NTFS, but obviously I'd like to see a more well-rounded test. And of course none of these cover the question of whether Windows performance would improve running in a Linux VM.

> And of course none of these cover the question of whether Windows performance would improve running in a Linux VM.

Well, of course not. It's completely absurd that Windows runs better in a VM. When I tried it, I expected my work "computer" at home to be impossible to use, so I would go and fetch some hardware at work. I was very surprised that it actually performed better than the work hardware (on anything that isn't CPU bound). (And yeah, as much as Windows lags behind on those benchmarks, it's not nearly enough to explain what I've seen.)

There is some other comment hinting at the VM ignoring some fsync barrier. I've seen the VM caching a lot of disk IO, but there is probably some very stupid application level choice involved there too. But on Windows, it doesn't have to be fsync, as there is locking too to ruin your day.

Why is this?

I have a little idea. I know Windows does a lot of useless disk access¹, but I never thought it was localized before I tried a VM. I always assumed it was random, but it looks like it's kinda random, but all over the same small area, and Windows can't optimize it for some reason.

Anyway, if you do that, you better keep those ~3GB free. If you don't have enough cache things break down really fast.

1 - It is for cortana, file indexing, telemetry, and etc. If you take the time to disable them, your computer will get much faster... for about a week, until it updates again.

While we're spitballing, from my recollection, it seems to do a lot of small writes; probably different write cache policies, possibly including the VM not passing through fsync/write barriers.

And, you know, organizational failure to have this issue lingering.

I'm pretty sure a lot of this is telemetry related. Resmon will frequently show ETW (Event Tracing for Windows) files getting a detrimental quantity of I/O directed their way, especially at boot...

Ye sometimes my Win10 computer slows down alot and there is some telemetry service in the tasklist hogging like 5% CPU. The malware service is also a thief. I mean they could just make those run at like 1/5 speed and it would be fine. Add some sleep() ...