[ccfilms]

Im tweaking my page file, putting it on a seperate hard drive and giving it an absolute size (I have 512MB of RAM, so I making Inital and Max 1536MB - totalling 2048MB).

Here's my dilema - I have two hard drives: One hard drive is a Western Digital 120GB 7,200rpm w/ 8mb cache I use it for my O/s and software. The other is a slow offbrand (Quantum Fireball) 40GB 5,200rpm w/ 2mb cache.

Now, I'v heard that putting the page file on a SEPERATE hard drive that what you run your O/s and software on is optimal, however, I'm wondering if that's teh case for me since me secondary hard drive is so slow.

I'm prolly going to one of these days upgrade either my slave to a 60GB 7,200 2mb cache, or get a new master (250GB 7,200rpm 8mb cache) and make my current master my slave.



What my question is, I know that putting a page file on my secondary is said to be optimal, but is that still the case when my master with my O/s and software is much faster than my slave? I don't really see any performance drop (at least in gaming) with it being on the slow slave, but I'm just wondering which would be optimal.



Let me know what you guys think is best about which drive to put the page on. Thanks dudes.

[SaberZ]

In your case it would be best to make the static page file on the OS drive. It is optimal to have it on another hardrive, but if that HDD is slower than your OS drive it will cause more harm than good.


Keep it on your OS drive.

[MiDKnYtE]

You should really benchmark your system. since it is using a separate set of read/write heads, that may be helping more than hurting even on a slower drive. if the pagefile is on the same drive, then the heads will have to jump back and forth.

What do you mean "offbrand"? Quantum was around for a long time before they got bought out by Maxtor.

[Judas]

Find HD TACH, and run it, run a test on the main drive and then on the second..

IF you make (i'd suggest) a 5gb Partition as the FIRST partition on the second drive, it will be at the faster edges. I say 5gb because it's a solid number for page file.

40gb quatum drive will be rather fast even for being 5200rpm. I'd suggest putting the page file on that drive. make the initial 768 mb and then maximum 4096 (if you use my 5gb partition size idea)..... requardless, you will want a 768mb initial size

[Matth]

Yes, I'd go bigger, depending on what else you want to fit on the drive.
If you are resrving the space, I'd use a fixed size - or a minimum that will be larger than you reach (allocated, not just used) in any normal use.
The Rojakpot article http://www.rojakpot.com/default.aspx?location=5 is also interesting - though some of the issues change if you are prepared to reserve as much or as little of a whole drive as needed.

A 5400 rpm drive is not that much slower, as the data density can be higher, and it's plenty fast enough for offloading the swapfile - even if the main drive is twice as fast.

However, the gain from offloading the swapfile may be limited, unless you ARE memory-tight, and it's loading from the main drive while swapping to the other.

Offloading TEMP to another drive may be more effective, if you can get as many things as you can there (eg. Windows temp, IE cache - anything that doesn't stay, goes on the temp drive, anything that does, on the other) - far less fragmentation.