Allen S. Rout wrote:

I would think that the importance of contiguous placement would be very
strongly correlated with the disk tech.  If I go to FILE devclasses on my SSA,
I would think preallocating would be indicated.  If I were deplying on
something more abstracted (shark, netapp, etc) I would hope that the
inefficient placement would be swamped by the cache.

Would your predefined vols be smaller or larger than your scratch vols?  I'm
very interested in your thinking here.

Here is my thinking.  From what I gather about scratch volumes, they are
opened, filled with what data they are recieving, and closed - but not
allocated full size.  So, if I predefine, I might want to make my
volumes smaller, since there is more potential wasted space.