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I remember hearing that allocating space on NTFS on Windows takes a long time for a large amount of files and/or disk space compared to ext4 and the like on lin

I remember hearing that allocating space on NTFS on Windows takes a long time for a large amount of files and/or disk space compared to ext4 and the like on linux. Presumably they are built to write out 0's or something when they do that whereas in linux you're just updating inodes or whatever. I remember this was in reference to Steam allocating file system space for game files before downloading them. I don't know if it was the views of the designers of NTFS taking a different set of priorities or if it's more that NTFS wasn't designed as well as some linux file systems were.

WorldMaker 3y ago
That's my understanding: Windows doesn't want the security problems of people allocating disk space and trying to read back garbage deleted files left behind by other programs in the hopes of finding user secrets, so if you explicitly ask it to allocate a file of a certain size, it (slowly) fills it with 0s first. But also, Steam's allocation step seems an interesting relic of Windows 9X design patterns, smaller hard drives, worse cache/temp folder options, and (much) slower download speeds. It probably isn't necessary and they could maybe design something simpler and better from scratch today. (But it's probably a "not broke don't fix it" thing at this point.)