Having pagefile on a SLOWER hard drive than primary... ?

[joshg]

Currently in my system I have a 40GB WD 7200RPM ATA100 Hard Drive.

I just found an old Fujitsu 6.48GB 5400RPM hard drive lying around, and I'm considering making this my pagefile drive. However, I do actually have some concerns and questions about this...

First and foremost, how much of a performance hit will I see if having the pagefile on a 5400 ATA(33 or 66?) drive? It will still be better performance than if I only had one drive that acted as primary and pagefile, correct? 😕

Also, how is the size? Will 6.48GB be enough of a pagefile? I plan to do moderate gaming, mostly MMORPG related, so probably not a whole lot of FPS-type gaming (but maybe some...).

Finally, will it matter to have the devices on the same channel or different channels? I could either 1) put both HDDs on the same channel and have my CDRW and DVD on the same channel, or 2) put my DVD and primary HDD on one channel, and the CDRW and pagefile slave on the other channel (option 2 seems to make more sense to me - that way I can burn / record CD to CD at a much faster rate and still be able to burn HD to CD at a fast rate, as well).

Many thanks for any advice provided!! 🙂

- Josh

 

[SUOrangeman]

6.4GB of swap space should be more than enough. I can only imagine some that mega-server would have that much ... after it's chewed up a few GBs of RAM.

You should still see better performance with the page file on the smaller drive. This allows your main drive to keep its drive heads over the data area and not constantly switching back and forth between data and page file (assuming the files are not "close" on the platter surfaces).

BTW, how much RAM do you have? Anything in excess of 512MB or so may not yield great results ... because you may not be using that much of your page file in the first place!

My only caveat is that you may run into problems if that 6GB drive eventually dies. (Assuming Windows), weird things may happen during the boot process if the page file cannot be found. It's a fixable situation, but a pain nonetheless.

-SUO

 

[Lord Evermore]

Your CD burner can't use all the bandwidth of ATA33 anyway, so there's no chance of the buffer running out when recording CD to CD with both drives on the same channel. If you're using a DVD drive that reads CDs slower than you can burn them, the system has to pre-read the disc anyway otherwise it can't keep up with the burn, and as long as the DVD drive is able to read at least as fast as the burn, the issue with only one drive being active at a time shouldn't be a problem. The DVD drive will read data into the burner's buffer, and while the buffer is being used to write, the DVD drive can be reading more data, so the buffer should never get less than almost totally full.

Having the two drives on separate channels would give the best performance for the swapfile, but then if the CD drive is being accessed, the swapfile performance suffers.

I don't think you'll see any gain in performance using such a slower drive, probably a loss of performance. Unless you were working with like 256MB of memory and Everquest, your swapfile isn't being used much if at all for the game itself. Windows dumps almost everything into the swapfile in order to clear out memory for the active game data. More memory would help far more than a faster swapfile would. The swapfile will only be used if the game data takes more physical memory than is available, and in that case, having it on a separate slower drive is hardly going to make a huge difference than having it on the same faster drive. By that point, the game data isn't being constantly accessed from the hard drive and swapped into the pagefile, it's all loaded into a combination of memory and pagefile, so mainly the pagefile is being accessed.

When I play Battlefield 1942, my swapfile usage doesn't even go up more than a few megs over the normal usage, and the game only uses under 300MB of memory.

Having a 6.8GB swapfile would also be very useless and probably counterproductive. It'd be more clusters the OS has to track and addresses to cache, and your swapfile should never get that much usage. If you're going over more than a few hundred megs of swapfile, you're doing things that you ought to consider buying more memory for.

I think the days when concern over placement of the swapfile are coming to an end. WinXP's memory management is so much better than 9x, an swapfile usage in relation to how much memory many systems have these days is so low.

 

[Whitedog]

Originally posted by: joshg
Currently in my system I have a 40GB WD 7200RPM ATA100 Hard Drive.

I just found an old Fujitsu 6.48GB 5400RPM hard drive lying around, and I'm considering making this my pagefile drive. However, I do actually have some concerns and questions about this...

First and foremost, how much of a performance hit will I see if having the pagefile on a 5400 ATA(33 or 66?) drive? It will still be better performance than if I only had one drive that acted as primary and pagefile, correct? 😕

Also, how is the size? Will 6.48GB be enough of a pagefile? I plan to do moderate gaming, mostly MMORPG related, so probably not a whole lot of FPS-type gaming (but maybe some...).

Finally, will it matter to have the devices on the same channel or different channels? I could either 1) put both HDDs on the same channel and have my CDRW and DVD on the same channel, or 2) put my DVD and primary HDD on one channel, and the CDRW and pagefile slave on the other channel (option 2 seems to make more sense to me - that way I can burn / record CD to CD at a much faster rate and still be able to burn HD to CD at a fast rate, as well).

Many thanks for any advice provided!! 🙂

- Josh

Why are you concerned about your pagefile?

 

[ElFenix]

it might make your system slower. that 6.4 gig drive is gonna be a lot slower to access and you'll be lucky to get 10 MB/sec out of it

 

[joshg]

Thank you to everyone who responded!

There is actually no immediate concern about my swap, I just happened to find that old drive laying around and began speculating at what it could have been used for 🙂

I was sort of afraid that it might actually degrade the performance a little bit. My original post was written in haste while I was trying to do other things, so it wasn't exactly as well thought-out as what I normally do 🙂 . In addition to gaming, I also do web and occasional software development and relatively light (though sometimes it can get medium-heavy) graphics work (namely in Photoshop). 🙂

Currently I'm running 512MB of generic Micron (2x256, double sided mem config) so this stuff is not exactly "top quality."

I plan to upgrade to an nForce2 solution with AMD 2100+ and probably go with either 512MB or 1GB of HyperX memory. From the information that I've gathered from this thread, this should be enough to keep me chugging along 🙂

Thanks again all who responded! Hmmm... I guess I can just throw that drive on the FS/FT board! 😉

 

[Whitedog]

If you don't have a disk space issue, than I wouldn't consider using it for anything. Give it to someone who could use it, otherwise, it's a paperwieght. 😉