[mtrower]

On the hardware side, sure, it would be great to have cutting-edge tech. Money is a factor. Realistically, my hardware is good enough for my present needs.

On the software side, I am absolutely aware of what is available.

File operations do seem pretty slow on Windows. What I've noticed is that latency for individual access seems really bad. Does that latency actually scale with CPU speed?

Edit: btw, what were you using to unzip the file on Windows? How about Linux (unzip?)

What Linux kernel/distro, what sort of zip file (large files vs small, encrypted?)