>Folks,
>
>I will soon have a couple of new machines that will be used to run very disk-intensive routines, shovelling around many gigabytes per day. I have already written the processing routines as COM servers so that I can gain the advantages of having the executable run on a fast machine while being controlled from a workstation.
>
>Because my network administrator is of the opinion that Win98 is faster at local disk access, and speed is absolutely everything on this project, I would override my natural tendency to specify Win NT for these machines, if:
>1) Win 98 really is faster at local disk access than NT, and
>2) Win 98 can be reliably counted on to launch COM servers.
>
>Can anyone offer experience on the above two points?
>
>Again, because these are very disk-intensive operations, we will probably never have more than one instance of a COM server running at one time on one machine, so MTS does not play into the picture (we would be much more likely to buy more machines than to have multiple processes contending for disk access).

IMHO:

1) Win NT is going to be much better at disk activity. NTFS is a much faster format compared to FAT, offers much better recovery, and has security capabilities. Understand that this applies to partitions greater than 400 meg, under 400 meg FAT would be more effecient, but may still not be any faster. I'm assuming you are dealing with partitions greater than 400 meg and even if you aren't the trade offs are minimal.

2) Win NT is MUCH more robust. Your chances of serious problems is greatly reduced. The archetecture of NT was designed to segment processes preemptively.

3) Win NT will use the RAM you put in the box. Throw a half gig of memory in it and it will not only use it, it will reward you with better performance.

4) Win NT gives you options for things like disk striping which will provide even more performance for disk IO.

5) Win NT was made for networking.

I personally don't like running 9x at all, but I do run 95 on one of my laptops. Everything else I have is either NT workstation or NT server.

HTH