-----Original Message-----
From: John Chin <[log in to unmask]>
<snip>
>The larger clusters give better performance. Can you
>picture a 160MB Permanent Windows Swap File running
>on 4K clusters rather than 32K clusters (I admit hating
>cluster sizes larger than 32K; also, I usually stay FAT16
>for compatibility reasons). Think of the performance hit on
>an IDE drive, which requires CPU use for disk management.
>
<snip>
>
>John Chin
>

Perhaps this is off-topic, (i.e. software), but where does this
"better performance" come from?  Say, for example, that
I have de-fragmented my drive so that all files are now
arranged contiguously (the Norton Utilities used to do this,
but I do not know how to do it now).  Then, where is the
performance overhead with the smaller files?   Where is
the "performance hit on an IDE drive?"  What is the
mechanism (software or hardware) at work here?  Is there
any way we can make a judgement on the trade-off, given
the normal data supplied with a hard disk drive?

Dean