That is certainly true, even on an HFS formatted drive like my HD20. I have quite a large number of files stored on it, and it takes a LONG time to display a window in the Finder for the first time after cold boot.
Mac128, many thanks for your outstanding report. You clearly spent considerable time investigating this AND in typing it in for all to read! Hopefully the owner's of this 68kMLA forum are regularly backing up server data (and then confirming the backups are good) so we don't lose all this important information ever again!
I personally look forward to hearing more about your successes in partitioning the HD20, with some MFS and some HFS partitions and how well they interact with each other. Certainly, if the software you have takes up too much RAM to do its job, then it's not a practical solution. In such an event, I can only hope that the Nested Volume Manager would be an alternative partitioner. But it would take a programmer among us to compile the code given in that MacTech article. It looks like all the code is there in that article, but I myself am not sure how to piece it all together and compile it into a standalone app.
Anyway, once again, thank you Mac128 for your dedication to the classic Mac community. No doubt we have many other classic Mac lovers out there who actively tinker with their machines in technical ways; but sadly, only a select few "white knights" like Mac128 make time to sit down and report about those effects. Kudos, Mac128!