>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

Not the case for anything but straight sequential I/O, because Win98 is limited to using FAT file systems. NTFS is significantly faster when performing non-sequential I/O, is less subject to fragmentation, is less degraded by fragmentation, and offers significant advantages as far as security and access control (NTFS can operate with access rights at the file as well as the share level; FAT systems are limited to access control at the share level (IOW, even though you can assign access based on user identity through another access control provider, the privileges are assigned at the level of the share, and can't be further derived below the share level. Each individual file under NTFS has the potential to have its own access control permissions if you want them set at that level.)

>2) Win 98 can be reliably counted on to launch COM servers.
>

Launch, yes, but manage a pool of them or a set of shared resources, no. The operating system is not as robustly isolated from error, does not support all thread management models and does not have the full set of functionality needed to manage a pool of common resources (not a problem in this situation, but a problem if you planned to use MTS as a server instance manager). It also can't take advantage of multiprocessor motherboards, and can't manage a pool of server systems or participate in clustering, at least potentially an issue. It can't serve as a security provider. No load balancing is available. No fault tolerance is available.

>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).

If you really, truly believe that you are disk I/O bandwidth-bound, Win98 offers signficant disadvantages when compared to NT Server, which offers the ability to get tremendous bandwidth through the natively-supported RAID implementations (strip sets with or without parity.) I can get a honking lot of data bandwidth (I can saturate a PCI bus if necessary) with multiple data channels and soft striping, and more with dedicated RAID hardware, than I can under Win98, especially if you think you're gonna get loads of data over an IDE disk channel. I'd be pretty willing to be a whole lot of money that my NT Server box, with a a pair of 400MHz Pentium II processor and RAID 5 could put a pair of the fastest, toughest newest Pentium IIIs with a couple of the fastest Ultra-IDE drives in each running Win98 to serious shame if you're really saying the issue is disk bandwidth...