ok this is definitely a bit weird. tonight i tested the ntfs-3g writing speed with various apps and it was very good. copying a 100mb file was virtually instant, saving 100mb tiff files from gimp or photoshop/wine took not very long (around 10 seconds).
then i tried a few tests in maya, in each case saving the same 95mb maya ascii scene. here are the write times:
maya to ext3 as .ma - 1:30 (result 95mb)
maya to ext3 as .mb - 2 seconds (result 55mb)
maya to ntfs as .ma - 25 minutes! (result 95mb)
maya to ntfs as .mb - 4 seconds (result 55mb)
text editor to ntfs as .ma - 5 seconds (result 95mb
maya to fat32 usb drive as .ma - 1:10 (result 95mb)
interesting huh? same times occur saving from maya prompt. I don't understand much about the process maya has for writing .ma files but it's so much slower than the data transfer rate available it must involve some intensive read/write process that bottlenecks intensely at the ntfs-3g driver.