Speeding up NTFS file system access on Linux with a Windows virtual machine
Summary: Ntfs-3g is not performing well, here are some measurements and a complicated way to have faster NTFS filesystem access on Linux. Disclaimer: These tests were done on an Ubuntu 10.4 LTS installation, with the latest sw versions included in this Ubuntu distribution, but on the ntfs-3g site there are more recent versions of that ntfs-3g. I wanted to do a backup of my Linux based NAS, to an NTFS formatted hard drive, which meant to copy around 4 TByte of data. As the first step I built the disk into the NAS machine over a SATA connection and measured the drive speed: >sudo hdparm -t /dev/sdf /dev/sdf: Timing buffered disk reads: 432 MB in 3.01 seconds = 143.62 MB/sec This looks good, this means, 4 TB/143MB ~ 7 hours of copy time. Next I mounted the already formatted drive and did a copy test: >sudo mount -t auto /dev/sdf2 /media/windows/ >dd if=/dev/zero of=/media/windows/test bs=512 count=390625 390625+0 records in 390625+0 records ...