No, it's not NTFS versus ext in the sense you mean. The Microsoft messaging on this is misleading at best. It's that the NT filesystem stack puts the FS cache

No, it's not NTFS versus ext in the sense you mean. The Microsoft messaging on this is misleading at best. It's that the NT filesystem stack puts the FS cache between user space and the FS driver, whereas on Linux it sits between FS driver and the block device driver. What that means is that on Linux, you get caching of blocks containing FS metadata for free, but on NT it has to be manually performed. That kills perf when looking at a lot of metadata. When they say NTFS is to blame, they mean the NT FileSystem stack.