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I've read about 8dot3name problem when there is a large number of files on a hard drive partition (>300'000 is the general rule of thumb, it seems) but all the sources are at least several years old by now. With recent software and hardware developments, does disabling this legacy feature and stripping all existing short file name entries a good idea?

Using the fsutil 8dot3name strip /t /s /v c: (where /t is for testing, so no removal occurs) command I've found that I have 450k+ files with 8dot3names assigned to them on my OS drive and on my HDD, I have over a million. The system drive verbatim output shows a bunch of registry entries, which I suppose won't be removed without the /f flag, and on the HDD there are no such entries.

There are some older posts on this topic on StackOverflow (from 2008-2011) and here on SuperUser (from 2013) some of which are mentioning Windows 7 tests. There has to have been progress made regarding filesystem handling since then.

Specifically, on Windows 10 at the time of posting (build 1803, November 2018 updates) and when using an m.2 SSD (which is several times faster than a SATA SSD) for the OS drive, will it be beneficial to disable 8dot3name generation and strip all existing entries (leaving only the registry-tied entries)? And what about non-system HDDs?

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My advice : The performance increase is not worthwhile, and you may run into trouble when disabling 8.3 naming.

Performance increase : No one ever runs a program that creates 100K files in any one directory. During the running of any normal program, file creation for the some few created files is measured in milliseconds, so speeding it up 10-fold will not be noticeable at all.

Compatibility : Some programs store file-names in 8.3 format inside the registry. These programs may stop working if you strip them away. The 8.3 names are also still in use by many installers, so you may find yourself unable to install products that use them.

In short : I would recommend leaving 8.3 naming untouched. The performance gain would be so low as to be non-measurable, but the chances for getting in trouble are pretty high.

I don't think that this has changed in Windows 10, since NTFS is still very highly compatible on format with previous Windows versions. The 8.3 naming option was never mentioned by Microsoft in any list of improvements in Windows 10.

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I've been logging solar panel usage data to an AWS bucket every minute for several years and the filename started with the unix timestamp.

Recently when attempting to sync these 1.9 million files (10GB) to my local computer I observed that the aws s3 sync process exponentially slowed down and almost ground to a halt.

Running fsutil behavior set disable8dot3 1 provided an instantaneous and extremely obvious speed boost.

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