If a drive doesn't know about partitions and files systems why moving a file from one partition to another takes relatively long time, unlike the instantaneous move on the same partition? Is that file system inefficiency? In this case, NTFS. It seems like the file is being copied and then original is erased, instead of removing the entry about that file in one partition and making it in another?
Answer
Each partition has it's own, independent file system. If you move a file within a partition, the file system can simply rewrite the reference to that file.
But when moving a file between partitions, the file system on the destination partition doesn't know anything about the new file - there is no reference to adjust. Furthermore, each partition will have it's own physical area of the drive to itself, so the file must be copied to the new partition, then deleted from the old partition.
Copying large files in this manner is often slow, probably even noticeably for some SSDs, because the drive is thrashing between reading one area and writing to another.
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