The last time I did FS tests was admittedly around 4 years ago, but back then Windows was several times slower on pure FS performance benchmarks (creating/listing/deleting large number of directories and files).

It used to be _much_ slower, like orders of magnitude slower, especially for directories with a large number of files.

You're not seeing "pure" FS performance. You're seeing all of the abstractions between you and the file system.

To get more of the abstractions out of the way, you want DevDrive. And don't use Explorer.exe as a test bed which has shims and hooks and god knows what else.

I was testing the performance using plain C++ code.