>>>3. If there are a lot of linear reads and writes, Win 98 with FAT32 is actually faster than WinNT. (For that matter Fox/DOS on OS/2 is faster than any possible windows platform, but this is not practical in most cases).
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>>Absolutely, positively, beyond any shadow of a doubt wrong, especially with a dual processor configuration. NT with NTFS and stripe sets (or better, hardware RAID) and correct tuning of NT is going to leave the biggest, fastest baddest Win9x box bleeding an inch or two from the starting line.
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>Can you please define "properly tuned?" What I'm wondering is this: If I have two SCSI drives on a single controller (Adaptec 2940), currently partitioned completely separately as F and G, will I see a measurable performance gain if I repartition them as one unit, courtesy WinNT? This is my test box and I would be happy to do the repartition and run the tests if it yields a demonstrable result to management.

Properly tuned - RAM is adequate, drivers are current, foreground/background priorities are set, swap files set in optimal fashion, and VFP's buffer memory allocation controlled to keep the buffer use in check, and within the bounds of the physical memory available on the system. Large, misallocated swap files, incorrect adjustment of the system's resource allocation priorities and misdirected VFP configuration can all potentially hurt the system throughput.

If you think your problem is disk I/O bandwidth, RAID will provide the means to fix the problem by spreading the I/O for a single file across multiple drives. You'll need NT Server or NT Server Enterprise to get the fault tolerance support for the native OS, and you'll want to construct a stripe set without parity for the maximum raw throughput. Two drives soft-striped without parity represents software-based RAID 0 with the least possible improved performance - I typically use 4-8 drives in an array, and if channel bandwidth is an issue, will use multiple SCSI channels. If you can, use drives that support synced spindle operation so that rotational latency delay is minimized.

Which 2940 is involved? It may not have adequate channel bandwidth if its an older model and you're using narrow cabling; there are fast drives like the Quantum Atlas IVs that can overwhelm a Fast SCSI-2 narrow channel in and of themselves.