I'd say you pin can pin it down mostly to those reasons: * Do you have active snapshots (vssadmin list shadows)? Halves random writes to disk in the worst case

I'd say you pin can pin it down mostly to those reasons: * Do you have active snapshots (vssadmin list shadows)? Halves random writes to disk in the worst case. * Do you have USN journaling enabled (fsutil usn queryjournal c:)? Adds extra IO to meta-data operations. * NTFS/FAT is optimized for fast directory listing speed so modifying files also modifies directory entries. Nothing one can do about that (except being aware of that and designing programs with this in mind). * Windows doesn't keep as much dirty fs data in fs-cache. I know of no way to change that. One can probably, if one uses a Windows Server OS. * Is a on-access Virus scanner active? If yes, one cannot compare performance to Linux. It's a massive bottleneck.