VanguardLH wrote:

In Everything.ini (there will be a copy in the program installation and
under the %appdata%\Everything folders), you can change max_threads. I
think 0 (zero) means to open as many threads as there are processors
(which would be cores across all CPUs). Setting it less, like 1 less
than the number of cores, would make Everything use less CPU but make
its indexing take longer.

If your drives are HDD, then you don't need more threads
than spindles.

Blinding indexing partitions in parallel is counterproductive.
You can work in parallel, one thread per spindle, to good effect.
If a HDD has four partitions, inspecting them sequentially makes
sense.

If your computer is filled with SSDs, you can crank that as
high as it will go. With no head assembly to throw around,
"it's all silicon" :-)

You could use Process Monitor, if curious about what the
actual strategy is.

There was one other software product, that got this kinda
wrong at first (it allows the user to set the number of
threads, but also has the option of "using its own discretion").
Hashdeep would use multiple cores, and throw the heads all
over the place while calculating MD5 for all the files
on a disk. Later versions serialized HDD access a bit better,
so the disk didn't thrash disk-wide from the pattern used.

On an SSD, hashdeep can go nuts if it wants (as the hardware
isn't a limitation). (On Win10, you have to disable
Windows Defender if you want some speed out of the thing.
It's yet another application slowed down by WD scanning
in parallel.)

Paul