>P.S. Ed,
>Somewhere in the middle of that last response I meant to ask you for any good reasons why would I want to change my partitions around?

A number of reasons. First, NTFS offers lots of advantages as far as slack space (the base unit of allocation is 512 bytes, so less space is wasted on small files) and security (NTFS allows you to set file permissions on a file-by-file basis as well as on a directory-by-directory basis. This alone might make using NTFS rather than FAT16 attractive.

Second, the maximum size of a partition is different under NT and older Win9x FAT16. Under NT, the boot partition can be as large as 4GB under FAT16, and with a current motherboard BIOS, as large as 7.8GB with NTFS (the largest partition that can be created using the NT Setup program is 4GB, but you can use a third-party product like Partition Magic to pre-create the partitions for you.

Third, random file access is significantly faster under NTFS, but sequential read access is faster under FAT. If you tend to have lots of files in a directory, NTFS partitions handle overpopulated directories much faster than FAT16 partitions.

I normally allocate my drives differently under NT and Win9x; I like to allocate a disk partition on each physical drive under NT for use as a swap drive, and then allocate swap files on these dedicated swap partitions (one per physical disk in the system.) Making a swap partition avoids the issue of fragmenting the swqap file because of other installs. There are advantages in system performance to allocating some swap space on each phsyical drive (not on each partition); there's a good discussion of it on John Saville's NT FAQ, a web page you'll want to keep handy if you work with NT in any case.

One drawback of NTFS or oversized FAT16 is that you can't use some existing Win9x tools to do diisk maintenance. Since I use NT-specific tools, it isn';t a problem for me; if you haven't got disk recovery and maintenance tools designed to run under NT, it might be a consideration.

You have options for creating volume sets (a volume set is a logical drive made up of multiple partitions, possibly on multiple drives), and stripe sets (a way of spreading a single large write across multiple drives, which can offer performance advantages, and if you use NT Server, stripe sets with parity implement some fault tolerance options as well.) In both cases, there are advantages to NTFS. And NTFS partitions other than the system or boot partitions can be HUGE - I have one on my NT Server at home that's a single 27GB logical drive, a stripe set with parity made from 4 9GB SCSI drives. It's fast, in some cases 3 times the speed of any one drive since the data being read in a large read may be read simultaneously from 3 of the disks in the stripe set. The speed improvements are very noticable with large data sets (I work with some horrendously large data for logistics and shipping data manipulation) but this requires some relatively high-end disk hardware (I use a motherboard with a dual channel SCSI chip on-board and an Adaptec ARO1130SA in my NT Server box.)

hth,

Ed

>
>(thanks again)