SSD fast in ESXi and Windows slow in Linux

[leonroy]

Upgrading parts of my homelab and doing some storage tests using sysbench:

sysbench --test=fileio --file-total-size=64G prepare
sysbench --test=fileio --file-total-size=64G --file-test-mode=rndrw --max-time=300 --max-requests=0 run
sysbench --test=fileio --file-total-size=64G cleanup

I'm getting odd results which I don't really understand. In my tests below an Ubuntu VM in VMware Workstation is 20x faster than in Proxmox on bare metal on the same hardware.

Even ESXi on bare metal is faster with a USB3 SSD...

Proxmox - ext4 - Ubuntu in LXC - Crucial 960GB M500 - SATA

read, MiB/s: 2.17
written, MiB/s: 1.45

Windows - NTFS - Ubuntu in VMware - Crucial 960GB M500 - SATA

read, MiB/s: 46.25
written, MiB/s: 30.83

VMware ESXi 6.7 - Ubuntu in VM - Samsung T5 500GB - USB-A 3.1 Gen 1

read, MiB/s: 40.96
written, MiB/s: 27.30

In fact doing further testing on Ubuntu on bare metal using ext4 and zfs shows similarly poor performance:

Ubuntu 18.04 LTS - ext4 - bare metal - Samsung 250GB EVO 850 - SATA

read, MiB/s: 7.11
written, MiB/s: 4.74

Ubuntu 18.04 LTS - zfs - Samsung 250GB EVO 850 - SATA

read, MiB/s: 4.08
written, MiB/s: 2.72

Why are Windows and ESXi so much faster?