Peter Brownwater wrote in a message to Bob Juge:
BJ> Frank, it's more than just what you've stated.  When you get
BJ> 300-400 *.msg messages in a DOS file subdivision, access s l
BJ> o w s down to a crawl.   
 PB>      Once a week, defrag and Speed Disk.
I don't think that will help at all.  The problem with DOS and FAT is I 
believe related to memory limitations when you hit around the 300 message
watermark.  
BJ> Also, with today's larger hard drives, if you're using the
BJ> max DOS 2 Gig drive (without partitioning it into smaller
BJ> logical drives), each message (even if it's only 500 bytes
BJ> in size) will take up 32K of disk space because that's the
BJ> minimum DOS cluster size on a 2 Gig drive.
 PB>      Another good reason to PARTITION
The problem with that is the optimum partition to conserve space is also what 
will cause a problem with fragmentation.  HPFS eliminates both problems.
BJ> The "database" approach used by Squish & Doug Boone's
BJ> variant has many advantages, the ability to manipulate the
BJ> messages in the database certainly isn't as trivial as with
BJ> the *.msg format, but since when is the easiest route the
BJ> best?
 PB>     Since forever.  
I've always related simple to less flexable, which generally means less 
simple or impossible to do much other than what someone else thought you 
wanted to do.
 PB> They went to the *.MSG format when
 PB> people had 20 to 40     meg drives.
FAT was designed for 360k floppies. It needed a kludge to work in > 32 megs.
FAT hasn't changed much at all since then.  It is the worst file system known 
to man, regardless if running a database or a *.msg format.  A database 
format has some advantages, but I never felt a database was particularly well 
suited for random length text files.  An HPFS FS eliminates the major 
disadvantages of a *.msg format, those being speed, wasted space and 
fragmentation, yet maintains the advantages of dependability, ease of 
manipulation and so on.
Those of us who like a *.msg base would find HPFS ideal, and its also great 
for large databases.  Perhaps FAT32 will improve things a bit for the DOS 
world, but I've heard little good about it, sounds like just another kludge 
from MS for large drives. 
                                              Jack 
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