Murray Lesser wrote in a message to Andy Roberts:

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.

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

That may be the only instance that FAT might be better, only because of space
considerations.

 ML>     Choice of file system should depend on what one is going
 ML> to put into the partition, not on the "Team OS/2"
 ML> conventional wisdom.  I agree that for general use with
 ML> partitions that are much larger than 100 MB, HPFS has enough
 ML> advantages over FAT to be the preferred choice.  

I think it has advantages in smaller partitions than 100meg, and unless the
partition only has (as in your case) one, or a few large files, about the 
only disadvantage HPFS has is the intital space HPFS uses.  If I recall
correctly, HPFS generally takes about 7 megs of space for whatever it is
doing, I don't know what FAT uses, but to me, that would be the only issue.  

FAT uses only a single linked scheme pointing to the next cluster so it is
vulnerable to lost files, it is subject to fragmentation, it wastes space
using at least 2 clusters per file, doesn't have room for EA's, has a less
robust cache, and of course long file names.  I agree that using an IOMEGA zip 
disk for one big backup file might be smart to use FAT, but other than that,
and really small disks like a floppy, FAT is just not a good filesystem to
use.
Even in your case, using a zip disk for backup, HPFS has the better scheme as
far as ensuring recovery in case of failure due to loss of the super-block or
root directory.  Chkdisk has better recovery possibilities under HPFS than
under FAT, so it might be worth using even on a ZIP disk with a few large
files.

 ML> For partitions much smaller than 100 MB, FAT is usually the
 ML> preferred choice because it will provide both more capacity
 ML> and better performance.  

Wonder what about FAT will give better performance?  I think HPFS may not have 
a performance advantage speed wise on small disks with few files, but I don't
think it has any performance disadvantage, speed-wise either.  Intital space
seems to be the only advantage FAT has over HPFS.

                                              Jack 
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