I can definitely believe that.

Just out of curiosity, what is FS on the USB ?
At home I always re-format to ext4 .

Good question! It is NTFS.

Can you get another (same) USB and format to ext4 and do a timing run on that and compare to the NTFS one?

Engineering experiment
Always test rather than assume.

Glad to see you did the timing experiment earlier

By default GNU tar does a number of checks to ensure that an extracted file(s) do not manage to escape the root directory of where it's being extracted too. This can slow things down quite a bit if the archive contains a lot of links. If you trust the archive not to have any malicious content then extracting with the --absolute-names option turns off these checks and should speed things up.

Here's a blog post about the issue, and a follow-up hacker news thread. which also has some interesting comments.

Yes, I do plan on trying the ext4 thing, but may not be for while. I needed to get this tarfile restored under system-down conditions, so I just grabbed a drive that was handy and used that. Normally most of our USB drives are formatted to ext4, but this particular one was a retired Windows workstation external drive used for Acronis image backups and was therefore NTFS. Usually, I recycle these for one-shot quarterly backup on Linux and do reformat to ext4, but hadn't done that on this one. I am curious if it would work faster as ext4.
Wow! that fellow did some extensive research on tar! Very interesting stuff. Great post.

Now, if tar could only preserve ACLs!

GNU tar has --acls option.
man tar

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Awesome! Yes, I must have missed that. --acls is in the man page. I'm sticking that and --xattrs in my tar script right now!