Win 10: Slow folder traversal and file saving to flash drive [SOLVED]

[officeboy]

see my earlier posts on 06 Mar 2019 and 01 Apr 2019

I routinely sync between work and home PCs via a flash drive. To do that I invoke FFS 3 separate times to sync 3 different folders, each containing about 40000 files. FFS does the first one rapidly, no problem. But the 2nd and 3rd time FFS slows to a crawl, unless I wait 5 - 10 minutes between invocations. And after the last run I would have to wait 5 minutes before I could safely remove the USB drive.

This problem never really went away since my earlier posts. Today I finally found a Windows 10 setting that totally fixed the issue (currently using FFS 10.16 on W10 1903 64b):

fsutil behavior set disablelastaccess 1

The setting is explained in these links:

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-server/administration/windows-commands/fsutil-behavior

http://www.ntfs.com/ntfs_optimization.htm

[Zenju]

It seems "DisableLastAccess" is already set to 2 (="System Managed, Disabled") by default for all OS beginning with Windows 7.

[officeboy]

Both PCs (Lenovo Thinkpad X1 Carbon, W10 Pro, October 2019; and Dell Optiplex W10 Pro, April 2019) arrived with last access timestamping enabled (NtfsDisableLastAccessUpdate disabled). Microsoft's name for this setting is very confusing. If "DisableLastAccess" is set to "Disabled", it means that last access timestamping is enabled.

The difference in performance of FFS is dramatic in the scenario I described.