Move windows xp page file to front of drive?

[webmal]

How to move Win XP page file to front of drive (on a single drive PC)? is this recommended?

 

[EeyoreX]

Norton Speeddisk used to claim it could do this. Frankly, the performance increase would be so miniscule (if one exists at all) that I don't see the point.

\Dan

 

[Algere]

I read various sources that it does improve performance which as I remember the access time is quicker if it's near or at the front of the drive and I too have it in the front of the drive on a seperate partition. As to if it's possible I assume it is but not certain esp. if there's already a O/S installed. If it's possible, then using a Partitioning program like PartitionMagic may do the trick.

I'm pretty sure for certain that it's better to have it in the front than the back of the drive

 

[EeyoreX]

Again I will say that it doesn't matter. For one thing, many computers today have large enough amounts of RAM that the pagefile is rarely used in the first place. And secondly, the fractions of a second of difference will not be noticable if you do dip into the page file. Regardless of if it is at the beginning or end of the partition, it is going to be slow compared to RAM. There may be a difference if the pagefile is on a totally different drive with a single partition (to keep the physical drive from reading from/writing to more than one place on the drive) but even the increase here would be minimal, at best.

\Dan

 

[Algere]

Todays systems yea would have to agree on that, physical ram is cheaper than what it was then so it's not a bad option to upgrade if your ram amount is low and in todays systems with lots of ram the page file isn't usually used as much. Although it depends on the amount of ram and the task load.

If it's a older system then the pagefile will most likely be accessed a lot more.

If you do have 2 hard drives then placing the page file on a seperate physical drive from the drive that the O/S is on is probably better. You can also create a RAID-like striping of the pagefile with 2 drives also.

http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;197379

http://tweakxp.com/display.aspx?id=2107

 

[bsobel]

Originally posted by: webmal
How to move Win XP page file to front of drive (on a single drive PC)? is this recommended?

Your right that the front of the drive is somewhat faster, however you shouldn't be paging much anyhow (if you think you are you'll be much happier just adding some memory).

Bill

 

[spyordie007]

another thing to keep in mind is that although the "front" of the drive may be faster your seek times will increase as the drive heads get further away from the system files, etc. you are working with. So if your system/program/work data is at the end of the drive and you are doing a fair amount of paging it would probably be better to have the pagefile near the end of the drive as well (else it has to seek back/forth across the entire drive).

But like pretty much everyone has already said just get yourself some more RAM and it wont matter much at all.

 

[Smilin]

Hey fellas:

FYI, there is a MFT near the front of the drive (typically at sector 64) and a backup one near the middle of the partition.
Both get updated when data is written so how is moving the pagefile to the front of the drive going to speed things up? As long as the data being written is before the backup MFT the round trip is the same (don't forget a 2nd stop off at the MFT since it's journaling).

Theoretically putting the pagefile halfway between the two MFTs would work the best since the head would have to move a shorter distance to make an update (head movement being the major slowdown on drives). This is all a bunch of hooey anyway. There are other related things that would make a bigger difference:

Set start and stop sizes of the pagefile the same.
Put the pagefile on a different physical drive.
Set your registry not to page the kernel.
Buy a stick o ram.

 

[bsobel]

The setting to not page the kernel does not involve the page file (other than the fact that other things may page more into the pagefile if you waste memory on this optimization you don't have)

Bill

 

[dawks]

As far as I know that was one of XP's enhancements. They moved the page file to a different part of the disk by default. Not sure if it was the start or middle. But the changed it from 2000.

Or they at least moved it within the partition.

 

[monzie]

Raxco's PerfectDisk (a defragger) rewrites the HDD and puts all the important windows files on the outer edge of the HDD whilst defragging (and unlike xp's defragger it defrags everything).

You can download a free 30 day trial version here:

http://www.raxco.com/products/perfectdisk2k/more_info.cfm

It works on my set ups (3 machines all with single HDD's) and you do notice a difference (but only after the first use, obviously......you can't move the files to a new outer edge).....

Anyway what have you to lose, give it a shot, a GOOD defrag alone can speed things up!

 

[Smilin]

Anyway what have you to lose

heh. good one.