USB3 disks cannot provide decent performance

Everyone kind of knows and suggest this, but Now I have empirical evidence: I have switched the connection of seven SATA HDDs in two enclosures to my PC

• from two direct USB3 connections
• to two eSATA connections of an Akitio (single) ThunderBolt(1)-(dual)eSATA bridge (connected to an Apple ThunderBolt 3 to ThunderBolt 2 converter)

And even in this complicated TB3-TB2-TB1-2xeSATA-7xSATA performs waaaay better than the old 2xUSB3-7xSATA setup:

Screenshot shows 692megbit/sec total active torrent speed that does not even include torrent protocol and TCP/IP overhead and any other traffic on the host. That actually goes though my (gigabit Ethernet) router too. Seems gigabit fiber internet connections are not just a promise.

Before switching the disk access path it never went above 300megabit/sec.

Probable reason is USB3 does not implement DMA (compatible USB3.1 device-host pairs would do) while TB1-2-3 are basically PCIe connections channeled outside the computer case. :)

VMware slow because of MsMpEng.exe (Microsoft AntiMalware Service Executable)

Have you noticed how much CPU MsMpEng.exe (AntiMalware Service Executable) uses while running vmware? (for me 10-25% of the CPU if the VM is active).

I tried to add exceptions for Windows Defender in Windows Defender Security Center for:

• program vmware-vmx.exe
• and file types vmdk, nvram, vmem and vmx.

Seems to help a lot... now it stays below 2% CPU all the time :)

How to make BackBlaze faster?

I was struggling a lot to make uploads of BackBlaze complete faster. An have discovered an issue under Windows 10 (might be relevant on earlier versions as well) while the system is was heavy load: a process called MsMpEng.exe was using of a lot of disk and CPU: Windows Defender checking everything mindlessly.
I had added exclusions even for itself, and this made the system a lot more responsive and performant!

Process exclusions

I tried to add only processes which only read files, big files, or lots of them, but are not used to put new files onto the system (as opposed to e.g. totalcmd.exe)
I added these exclusions:

• 7zG.exe
• bztransmit64.exe
• bztrans64_thread00.exe
• bztrans64_thread01.exe
• bztrans64_thread02.exe
• bztrans64_thread03.exe
• bztrans64_thread04.exe
• bztrans64_thread05.exe
• bztrans64_thread06.exe
• bztrans64_thread07.exe
• bztrans64_thread08.exe
• bztrans64_thread09.exe
• dwm.exe
• msmpeng.exe
• perfmon.exe
• searchfilterhost.exe
• searchindexer.exe
• searchprotocolhost.exe

File type exclusions

Mostly large, non-executable media files:

• avi
• jpeg
• jpg
• mkv
• mp3
• mp4
• mpeg
• mpg
• orf
• ts

Location exclusions

• C:\Program  Files\Windows Defender
• ...