thank you (also, as part caring for good karma in case someone runs into such matters) the two (or three) silver lines I got from you comments were:
a) defragment that NTFS partition once in a while. i mostly use that partition to read legacy data, but I didn't know you could defragment a windows partition within Linux, on unix.stackexchange: https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/13976/is-there-a-linux-tool-for-defragging-ntfs-partitions they were talking well about: https://www.tuxera.com/community/open-source-ntfs-3g/ which I got: # which ntfs-3g /bin/ntfs-3g # ntfs-3g --version ntfs-3g 2016.2.22AR.1 integrated FUSE 28 b) those disks are pretty full I have heard that disks need some "elbow room", but I thought that was only necessary if you use them for reading and writing (not just for linearly reading) c) using FAT carries the 4Gb limit on file sizes which I don't want to be dealing with. I prefer to deal with the other kinds of problems lbrtchx
