Excruciating disc speed - win10 ent - usb 3.1 - NVME

[blistovmhz]

Trying to get win10 Enterprise running on a USB>NVME adapter. Copy to disc is about 3-4 minutes. R/W speeds under linux or native win are absurd. 4k R/W around 70-100/200-250MB/s.
Fire it over wintousb though, and it takes 30 minutes to boot on a high end machine. Meanwhile, If I just install Win7 to a USB (not using WintoUSB), first boot is about 10 seconds and the system is screamin'.

Once the Win10ent is booted (wintousb) I couldn't even bother to try getting anything installed to benchmark. Network is stupid fast, anything copying into RAM is fine. Disc IO however is pegged at 100% with a few KB/s. Just as a test, I did a PXE boot that ultimately lands over rs232 just for fun. Was still faster.

Did a quick RW test against the disc from Linux, and it's got no problem moving the data I expect.

What's going on here? I'm about to try a win7 via WintoUSB as well (just writing now).

Ah, P.S. Also tried on a decently fast USBFlash key. Same horrific speed. Even after it's gone through the first boot, subsequent boots are 15-20 minutes. This key gets around 150MBps, with around 50/150 4k rw. Essentially all the way to potato though with WintoUSB

Ah crap. P.P.S. I'm running WintoUSB in a win10 ent VM under linux. I suppose.... it's possible you guys are doing something funky with the disc because of this?

[blistovmhz]

Update. Tried Win7 pro as well. Exact same issue. Tried booting on another machine as well. No change.
I don't have a native windows machine (thus why I'm trying to do this ). Is this likely an issue due to writing the image from a Linux VM ?

[admin]

Are you running portable Widnows on a physical machine or a virtual machine? Please make sure portable Widnows is running on the physical machine and make sure that the USB drive is inserted into a USB 3.0 port of the computer.

For an operating system boot drive, 4K random read/write speed is very important. If the 4K random read/write speed of the USB drive is too slow, then the USB drive is not suitable for creating portable Widnows USB drive. Please use CrystalDiskMark to test the 4K random read/write speed of the USB drive.

How to Run a Hard Drive Speed Test:
http://www.buildcomputers.net/hard-drive-benchmark.html

[blistovmhz]

I... documented all of that in the OP.

Running the USB against a physical machine, not a VM. The point here is I need to have a physical windows machine once a year. I hate to waste an entire disc slot for it, thus USB/NVME.


Yes, I've tested 4k RW. 70-100/200-250MB/s. Random is pretty similar. I also tested with a hardware RAID 0 of two of these NVME discs. Zero change in performance. I also tested with the slowest, oldest USB 2.0 flash drive I could find, and it was identical.

[blistovmhz]

Okay, incidentally, I was correct in my assumption. Wintousb does something strange when you're running it in a VM with discs passed through, during the install. I used the 30 minute to boot Win I'd created to write another copy, and this one is perfect.

One question though. 
When I used WintoUSB from my Windows VM, the resulting image contains all of my files/programs, while the secondary copy created from the now native windows install running on USB, did not. It gave me a completely clean windows install. 

Which is the intended behavior and is this controllable?

[admin]

When cloning Windows to USB, WinToUSB will copy all the files in source boot partition (Usually C: ) to the destination boot partition, it actually performed an exact copy and was out of control.