First post, by bakemono
OK, so here is a weird one... My computer has two HDDs, one with NTFS and the other with 2x FAT32 partitions. I have a program that does a lot of small writes throughout a file. But the files aren't very big, so usually execution is nearly instantaneous. Running it on a network drive might take 1 second or so. Running it on the NTFS drive is always instantaneous. But on the FAT32 drive (either partition), it is instantaneous some days, while others it will take several seconds. When it is in 'slow mode', it seems very much like Windows is sending a write command to the HDD for every filesystem write operation that happens instead of gathering several writes to the same sector or allocation unit.
Whatever the condition is, it is determined at boot time and doesn't change afterward. In other words, if I boot up and discover that the program runs slow on FAT32 today, I can be certain that it will stay that way until I reboot, at which point it might go back to normal or it might go into 'slow mode' again.
Reads aren't affected at all. HDtach shows the same benchmark result either way. HDD SMART data is fine.
I first noticed this phenomenon about three years ago, but it was very rare. Recently I upgraded the motherboard, and now it happens much more frequently.
Anybody ever heard of this before? I don't really know what else to do except add this to my list of "things to trace with remote kernel debugging someday"
GBAJAM 2024 submission on itch: https://90soft90.itch.io/wreckage
