Performance difference NTFS Linux and NTFS Windows
I need to format a disk to install Windows 8 on it (single boot). I cannot do it from Windows (I have only Ubuntu for now). So my questions are:
Will the disk formatted to NTFS with Ubuntu be slower than if I had formatted it to NTFS from Windows (the drivers are not the same as far as I know) ?
Or can I just simply format to NTFS from the Windows 8 dvd ?
Solution 1:
The drivers might not be the same but a formatted NTFS partition is a formatted NTFS partition. What ever the tool you use.
By the way: The Ubuntu driver is for mounting and writing to a NTFS partition already formatted as NTFS. In general you format a disk from the GParted software, not Ubuntu itself (though you can install GParted in Ubuntu and use it from there). If the GParted NTFS formatting tool was not up to standard Windows would consider it a corrupted file system and refuse to start from it.
Or can I just simply format to NTFS from the Windows 8 dvd ?
That question is off topic ... but the answer is: of course. You can format from any installation media since one of the 1st things to do is to set up your partition for a file system structure that that system needs to run on.
Solution 2:
No, it doesn't make a difference what OS you format your partition on, although it is generally advisable to use Windows for formatting partitions with Windows-specific file systems.
But: There certainly is a performance difference between using NTFS partitions on Linux and Windows. While Windows uses a native kernel driver, i.e. a very performant low-level driver, Linux uses NTFS-3G which runs in userspace, i.e. on a 'higher level', and is as such inherently slower.
Some of these performance differences can be ameliorated by following the recommendations listed in the Tuxera NTFS-3G FAQ, the big_writes option in particular, but I haven't been able to reach Windows-level NTFS performance on Linux so far.
Further reading:
NTFS drive mounted generates huge load
https://superuser.com/questions/613869/ntfs-write-speed-really-slow-15mb-s-on-ubuntu
https://superuser.com/questions/204000/are-there-faster-solutions-for-ntfs-on-linux-than-ntfs-3g