>Although the process started out very fast indeed, a couple of minutes in, the disk's write performance fell off a cliff, which you can see in the radically de

>Although the process started out very fast indeed, a couple of minutes in, the disk's write performance fell off a cliff, which you can see in the radically decreased performance graph above. // AIUI slow deletion is an MS Windows thing. A partial solution is offered here, https://superuser.com/questions/76906/deleting-large-amount-of-files-in-windows-is-slow https://superuser.com/questions/76906/deleting-large-amount-... -- command line deletion of files with output to 'nul' followed by pruning of directory trees is reportedly 3x faster.