4 ms·

ugh, I don't know why copying files and basic I/O is so fucked on Windows. Recently I was trying to copy some large movie files between 2 folders on an NVME SSD

ugh, I don't know why copying files and basic I/O is so fucked on Windows. Recently I was trying to copy some large movie files between 2 folders on an NVME SSD formatted to ExFAT in a good USB-C enclosure connected over 20Gbps USB-C port and explorer would literally just freeze & crash doing that. I had to copy one file at a time to make it not crash, and then it would have this weird I/O pattern where the transfer would do almost nothing for 1-2 minutes, then the speed eventually picked up. This isn't even going into WSL. I specifically stopped using WSL and moved to a separate linux devbox because of all the weirdness and slowness with filesystem access across the WSL boundary. Something like listing a lot of files would be very slow IIRC. Slightly tangentially, the whole situation around sharing files across OSes is pretty frustrating. The only one that works without 3rd party paid drivers on all 3 major OSes is ExFAT and that is limited in many other ways compared to ext4 or NTFS.

deleted 11mo ago
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toast0 11mo ago
This feels like usb 3 super speed flakeyness. Did you do all the usual things of trying different ports, moving sources of interferrence, etc? Front ports at super speed are typically the most trouble.
jeroenhd 11mo ago
Explorer freezing halfway through copying happens all the time for me, usually it means Windows' I/O buffer is full and the drive is taking its sweet time actually doing data transfers. Windows will happily show you gigabytes per second being copied to a USB 2.0 drive if your RAM is empty enough, but it'll hang when it tries to flush. Sometimes it's interference, sometimes the backing SSD is just a lot slower than it says on the box. I've also seen large file transfers (hundreds of gigabytes) expose bad RAM as caches would get filled and cleared over and over again. You should be able to go into the Windows settings and reduce the drive cache. Copying will be slower, but behaviour will be more predictable.

deleted 11mo ago

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toast0 11mo ago

This feels like usb 3 super speed flakeyness. Did you do all the usual things of trying different ports, moving sources of interferrence, etc? Front ports at super speed are typically the most trouble.

jeroenhd 11mo ago

Explorer freezing halfway through copying happens all the time for me, usually it means Windows' I/O buffer is full and the drive is taking its sweet time actually doing data transfers. Windows will happily show you gigabytes per second being copied to a USB 2.0 drive if your RAM is empty enough, but it'll hang when it tries to flush. Sometimes it's interference, sometimes the backing SSD is just a lot slower than it says on the box. I've also seen large file transfers (hundreds of gigabytes) expose bad RAM as caches would get filled and cleared over and over again. You should be able to go into the Windows settings and reduce the drive cache. Copying will be slower, but behaviour will be more predictable.