this post was submitted on 31 Oct 2025
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I don't fucking know why I can't eject USB hard drives. I installed the SysInternals apps, and best they can tell me is that Dropbox is fucking with the drives. I explicitly told Dropbox to not fuck with USB drives. I don't know who's lying, I just want whoever is fucking with the drives to stop fucking with the drives, OK??? OK.

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[–] qupada@fedia.io 38 points 1 month ago (8 children)

"Fun" fact: if you think it's slow normally (and to be fair, it is), NTFS seems to have a pathological performance regression when a directory contains more than 10,000 children, any operations on files in that directory slow down by around 95%.

I discovered this on our CCTV system at work (that runs on Windows Server 2022), which creates an inordinate number of small files (each containing at most a few seconds of video). It was causing some of its periodic maintenance tasks to fail, as they'd take longer to run than than the configured interval between them.

Windows also really doesn't like dealing with half-petabyte filesystems, just like... at all.

[–] the_crotch@sh.itjust.works 3 points 1 month ago (2 children)

Have you tried turning off thumbnails? In my experience when it slows down on large directories like that it's either trying to generate thumbnails or index a bunch of new files (which is also a possibility in your use case)

[–] qupada@fedia.io 2 points 1 month ago (1 children)

A great thought on the thumbnails, but the behavior exhibits even when using command-line tools.

Indexing is off for the entire drive, I can't even begin to imagine what kind of mess that would make if it was on.

[–] tromars@feddit.org 1 points 1 month ago

At this point I wouldn’t even be surprised if windows still starts generating thumbnails in the background when using the command line

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