<is quite a bit more elegant. Since some people here are fond of <praising the VAX, how does its file system work (typically)? Vax is hardware. VMS is an OS. Unix also run on vax. VMS is a fairly conventional albeit complex file system that can do sequential, indexed or random accesses. It deals with files, directories and volumes. <>contiguity). This made file access *fast* when you needed it. I still <>find fragmentation a nightmare even on Linux. Some file systems do more poorly than others with fragmentation. For the best fragmentation is a mild performance hit, in that it will take more disk seeks to find all the peices. For others (RT-11, NS*DOS) you can have an almost empty disk that is effectively full as the OS cannot allocate space peicemeal. VMS, DOS and CP/M perform well with fragmented files. Allison