(Excerpts from a message dated 10-22-99, Andy Roberts to Mike Roark;
  original topic: Warp 3 Install):

Hi Andy--

AR>While I can think of a lot of reasons to use HPFS rather than FAT, I
  >can not think of any good reason to use FAT rather than HPFS.

    If your whole partition will contain only a few long sequential
files, FAT is not only faster but has more capacity.  I back up to
Iomega Zip diskettes using the OS/2 BACKUP and RESTORE utilities.  It
would make no sense whatsoever to format those diskettes HPFS.

    Choice of file system should depend on what one is going to put into
the partition, not on the "Team OS/2" conventional wisdom.  I agree that
for general use with partitions that are much larger than 100 MB, HPFS
has enough advantages over FAT to be the preferred choice.  For
partitions much smaller than 100 MB, FAT is usually the preferred choice
because it will provide both more capacity and better performance.  (See
"Performance Tuning OS/2 Warp" - a white paper for Warp 3 ISVs, written
about the time Warp 3 was released by Ron Cadina (then at IBM Boca
Raton).  It is still available as \WARPPERF\WARPPERF.ASC on disc M1 of
DevCon Release 2 vol 3.)

    I keep one small (51 MB) partition on my HD as a "scratch" partition
for holding ephemera, such as the Netscape Cache and those intermediate
files built by my compilers.  It gets reformatted by STARTUP.CMD, which
is much easier than going through periodic housecleaning cycles, thereby
giving it most of the advantages of a very-large virtual drive! However,
since it is the only small partition on my HD, I keep it formatted HPFS
for consistency's sake; the small performance and space loss isn't
important for these files, and I need no separate FAT cache.

    But I would never attempt to format any of my "removable media"
drives HPFS.  While it would be possible (in some cases), it most
certainly wouldn't serve any useful purpose.

    Regards,

        --Murray

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 * MR/2 2.25 #120 * If you are not confused, you don't understand the
situation

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