Any advantage, page file on second drive versus on C:?

[GrumpyMan]

Just wondering in Win 2000 if there is any advantage to having my page file on my second hard drive which I just installed versus the regular default of C: 256mg of ram. Thanks.

 

[Qman71]

Actually I think you'll get the best performance by creating a pagefile on both drives.

 

[CTho9305]

the idea is that if you have it on the second hard drive, then you can access both the page file & your files on the main hard drive at once, which gives a performance boost during heavy swapping. If its on the same drive, then the head has to jump back and forth, but on a dedicated drive, it only has to move within the swap file.

 

[GrumpyMan]

I don't see the logic of putting a swap file on both drives but I definatly see the logic of putting it on just the second drive so it can access both program files and the swap file if necessary at the same time versus thrashing about on one drive. Thanks Qman and CTho.

 

[tasslex]

I've heard from quite a few people that creating equal-sized swapfiles on more than 1 or 2 drives will make it much faster, as it can then access more than one swapfile at the same time on multiple Hard Drives.

I did this on mine, setting the swap range to 200-350 on 3 Different Drives, and it FEELS a little faster, but that's not exactly scientific.

 

[GrumpyMan]

If I put a swap file on both of my drives wouldn't Windows continue to use the swap file on C: as the main swap file and therefore not be of any benefit in adding a second swap file on another drive. My question I guess is will Windows know what to do with the second swap file on another drive, wouldn't it use the C: swap file as the main one? I'm not being difficult just curious as to how that would work. And if it does work better how would I tell Windows to go ahead and set up a second swap file? Is it in the same Control Panel/System/Virtual Memory section or would it be done another way in Windows 2000? I already have a preset fixed swap file on C:. Thanks.

 

[Shadow07]

If you want to have a Crash-Dump file created if your system does happen to crash, you will need to have a pagefile equal to that of the total amount of Physical RAM + 12MB that resides on the System Partition (the partition that has the NTLDR/Boot.ini file).

Also, the only performance increase you will see is if the system happens to be a network file server. For a home machine, you realy won't see the difference. I haven't.

Actually, I want to ammend this: If you have multiple drives that will reside on two different controllers, then you might see an increase. If the drives themselves will be Master and Slave on the same controller, you will not see any increase as the same amount of data will be sent through one controller from two difference disks. This will actually hurt your system preformance.

 

[GrumpyMan]

I do have both drives on the same ide channel sharing the same ribbon as master and slave. In trying to think it through it really didn't make sense to me on how the system, reading and writing from two disks on the same channel at the same time, could be that much faster, I would think that it would take more time to access the two drives on the same channel and thereby provide no real world benefit. But I'm not sure because I have read that many people suggest that it is faster. Any way to benchmark this? What software would bench this?

 

[Shadow07]

I have a question for you. How do you think it would be faster? How can you pass more data through one channel as opposed to passing the same amount of data through two channels and be faster than having the drives on two different channels? It can't. And for someone to tell you that it would be faster, I have a bridge of gold to sell you.

So to say that you want to transfer 20MB of data from two drives and transfer data at 20MB/s is going to be faster than transfering the same amount of data on two drives that are each connected to their own 20MB/s channel is just plain wrong. Think of the old amount of lanes on the freeway saying.

 

[Agamar]

Microsoft says that it is faster to have the swap file spread over 2 drives. The amount of data over the bus should be the same even if the drives are on the same channel, but, since the hard disk will have a better chance of finding something in the swap file with 2 sets of read/write heads, it should find it faster.

This will only save very small amounts of time on a home computer, but on a file server, this can help save many minutes a day.

 

[GrumpyMan]

Thanks for the responses.