I've seen a one-month old HDD of an NT workstation. Since formatting,
NT was installed, PhotoShop, Corel Draw, Illustrator, Painter, 3DMAX,
Adobe Premierre, Cool Edit Pro (Taiti OEM), some PerceptionVR
software, and various smaller packages including POV-Ray (my doing :)
no one actually used it though :( ) This was the main workstation in a
local multimedia company. It had two HDs, one for software and one for
data. Oddly, software was working almost twice as slow as compared to
the PhotoShop-only machine or CorelDraw only machine, which were
equivalent in MB and CPU but with less memory and HD space, and were
running Windows 95 OSR 2. When the sysop ordered a trird party plug-in
for the workstation and ran it on the software HD, he almost lost his
marbles (me too.) There were about 500 file fragments, 200 swap
fragments and several thousand (!) free space fragments.

Perhaps it would have behaved better if there was more free space on
the HD. There was about a gig free, but swap was only about 50 MB at
the time (and it often ran up to 300-400 MB), I don't know. But to
claim NT needs no defragmenting is a dam^Hrn lie from MicroSoft and
nothing else.

AFAIK Linux needs no defragmenting (at least I've never seen a
defragmenter), but still when booting my SlackWare 3.5 it says "0.2%
non-contiguous" -- anyone have an idea what this might mean? I know
this part should really go to povray.unix, but then again, the first
part is for p.w :)


Peter Popov
ICQ: 15002700

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