Hard drive

[Burtie21]

internal separate HD for windows system cache, having the pagefile and temp files on your OS HD sloooowws the slowest mechanical part of your computer even SLOWER! so obviously separate HD for cache. <<quoted from maximumpc.com, about the 2004 dream machine

Im curious is it even possible to put your page file on a seperate hard drive, and if so would it be worth it?

Thanks, Graeme

 

[Megatomic]

My pagefile is on my second hard drive. Been that way for a long time.

 

[Carbonadium4]

yes it possible and its recommened for windows server to have page file on the fastest drive.. mostly raid 5 partitions...

i had my page file on a 3 drive raid 0 before, one drive died and the whole system locked.. this was my testing server.. so page file is critical.. unless you dont care, you can reboot and re-create another page file if the hdd fails

 

[Burtie21]

ok cool, so how would i go about doing it now?

 

[Nothinman]

Moving the pagefile is only beneficial if you have more than one physical drive, putting it on another partition on the same drive just makes things worse as you end up causing more seeks jumping between partitions. And it only really helps when you're actually using the pagefile, if you have enough memory in your system it's largely irrelevant.

 

[Burtie21]

i have a second hard drive, but i have 768 megs of ram, useless?

 

[Megatomic]

Useless only depends on what you do with your computer. If you work on editing large images in Photoshop or editing DV sequences or other such tasks then 768MB is not too much. Often 1GB or more of RAM can be consumed if the computer is taxed properly.

And to change the size and location of the page file, do this:

Open Control Panel
Open System
Click on the Advanced tab
Click on Settings in the Performance section of that page
Click on the Advanced tab
Click on Change in the Virtual memory section of that page
Here you can modify the size and location of the pagefile. You'll have to reboot when you are done.

Good luck.

 

[Nothinman]

Depends on what you do with the machine, it's like someone asking if a 100hp car would be enough for them without telling the dealer what the car will be used for.

 

[Burtie21]

so it wouldn't improve gaming at all?

 

[Nothinman]

Again, it depends. It would probably help load times if the game uses a lot of memory but I doubt it would affect in-game performance much if at all.

 

[Megatomic]

Not unless the game was consuming all your physical RAM (which is rare). That's not to say that games don't benefit from more RAM, though.

 

[Burtie21]

well it was worth a shot, thanks anyways guys but the only game i play is AAO and i don't think it's all that ram intensive seeing as how its based on the ut2003 engine, if u guys think it would help me then im all for it, if not then i don't really care

 

[Megatomic]

Nah, it won't help your gaming much if at all. The pagefile tweak might help with general windows operations though. My system is definitely snappier when the pagefile is:

1. static in size at 2x my physical RAM (I have the HD space to blow on a big pagefile)
2. on my secondary hard drive (same speed and cache size as my OS hard drive)