Why does the driver have high CPU utilization?
The most common explanations are Not using at least NTFS-3G Version 2009.3.8. Writing multi-GB files on a highly internally fragmented volume. Some software are using the most inefficient block sizes by default. A highly sparse file is being regularly written or updated. Some software indeed do intensive file operations sometimes (Beagle, Amarok collectionscanner, updatedb, Spotlight, etc). The CPU usage is not directly visible in case of kernel file system drivers but this is not true for user space drivers. That is, they are in the process list unlike the kernel drivers. Higher CPU usage is normal and expected in some scenarios. This is true for most file systems, not only NTFS-3G. The NTFS block size (cluster size) is smaller than 4096 bytes. This often happens, for instance, if FAT32 was converted to NTFS. The driver always logs this information for block devices. You can search for the value of the ‘blksize’ in the system log files under the /var/logs directory. Typically this inf
