great, im saying just thats not a solution.
I plugged that disk to a win7 and same, un-defragmented files and folders got good read speed and it was with a cheap sata expantion (6sats on PCI 1x) and still the read speed of small files was good under win7 OS!
But i just don’t want to get back to win7 by any means with the disk, not to confuse the file system more, or gain any more downtime, which took big hit already from my experiments lol/sad face
But I’m surprised that Win7 works better. I would expect that Win10/11 should perform better.
Because Win10 probbaly performs better, just he doesn’t like parts from the past like leftovers after win7, and prefers his own, “blessed” by him self. (probbaly intended, MS started hateing win7 as soon win10 come out)
My bet is a Win10 can’t handle after Win7’s disks, because can’t properly edit its structure, there is a difference for example in $LogFile format (win7 ver 1.1 vs Win10 ver. 2.0) so even when i made changes to the files by stripe 8dot3name, it did not last somehow.
But when new files now lands under win10, and 8dot3name creation is disabled on that disk, records are created completely new, with style probably Win10 likes the most, kay, im out, lets see after 30 days!
I still think this is related only to a defragmentation and the default options which you can disable/enable yourself.
This is pretty easy to check, if you have spare drives. Just move out all data which are on Win7 disk and move it back. I’m sure, it will perform as fast as a formatted under Win10.