extreme slowness working with FAT32 (other filesystem types fast)

[Luke Arms (one fine day)]

Hi,

I maintain several backup hard drives with rsync in cygwin and until 
recently was using NTFS on all of them. Now, for easy read/write 
portability across Mac OS X and Windows, some of the external drives are 
FAT32 (try not to hate ... yes, I'm aware of its weaknesses), and I've 
noticed that syncing them is incredibly slow... i.e. just detecting the 
differences takes about an hour, where running the same process to an 
NTFS drive takes well under 5 minutes (we're talking about 1TB drives 
with ~85,000 files; nothing too major).

I've done a bit more digging, and even running

du -h --max-depth 1

at the root of the FAT32 drive takes FOREVER, where listing all files on 
the drive from a Windows command line is near-instantanous. Setting 
noacl for all drives in /etc/fstab makes no difference at all. Running 
on XP SP3 vs. Win7 makes no difference either.

I appreciate that FAT32 isn't a popular choice and you might not be keen 
to troubleshoot it, but if there's a chance of getting to the bottom of 
this, I'd be a very happy camper.

I'm running the latest stable versions of everything, but have attached 
my cygcheck output for you.

Cheers,

Luke

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