This reminds me of the swapping/paging area in Windows 95/98 (maybe
other
versions too), which was kept in a file, and therefore might be
scattered all
over the physical disk. (Norton disk optimizer would coalesce the
swap/paging
area to a contiguous area of the disk.)
Noel
Windows still uses a pagefile, even today, on NT systems.
There's several advantages to doing it that way, including balancing
wear on a disk (especially today, with SSDs), as a dedicated swap
partition could put undue wear on certain areas of disk. It's also much
easier to dynamically allocate more (or less) swap space as is needed,
which was very important in the days when RAM was expensive and very
limited in quantity.
Of course, doing it that way has many disadvantages, not least the
fragmentation issue (which was the root cause of much periodic slowdown
on Windows machines in the mid 00's), but also the overheads involved
with transferring rather scattered and unorganised RAM contents into
nice, neat blocks understood by the filesystem. Though i have no numbers
to back up my claims, i'm sure the overheads involved in translating RAM
contents to a file was much more significant than just dumping the RAM
contents into a SWAP partition.
Josh Rice
