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Page file on slower drive?

C

Copro2

Junior Member
I have-
Athlon 64 3200+
1GB RAM
160GB SATA HDD
80GB PATA HDD

Right now, my SATA is one big partition with the OS, page file and apps etc on it. I need to reinstall win xp anyway and am thinking about creating a 5GB partition on the SATA just for the OS and a 4GB partition on the slower PATA drive for the page file.

I've read that having the page file on a seperate hard disk is best but considering that my PATA drive is slower will it actually have a negative effect on performance?

Thank you for any help.
 
1) A 5GB partition is a bit tight for an OS, it would probably be better to have a larger partition for both the OS and apps for better performance by minimizing head movement
2) Having the page file on an independent drive should more than make up any difference in speed difference
3) There is no reason to have the pagefile on its own partition. Just make sure that you clear enough space on the PATA drive and defragment it so that the pagefile can be created unfragmented
 
Originally posted by: Accord99
1) A 5GB partition is a bit tight for an OS, it would probably be better to have a larger partition for both the OS and apps for better performance by minimizing head movement
2) Having the page file on an independent drive should more than make up any difference in speed difference
3) There is no reason to have the pagefile on its own partition. Just make sure that you clear enough space on the PATA drive and defragment it so that the pagefile can be created unfragmented
Click to expand...

that is good advise, i too have a page file on a separate drive. i took it a step further and moved the temporary internet files to the same separate drive.
 
What if you're playing a game that uses more ram than you've got? Wouldn't it be better to have the page file on the faster drive in that situation, since the only hard drive access that would be going on is page file access?
 
Maybe I'm a bit biased (I have 6 OSes running from one 36GB Raptor ... with a few GBs to spare), but 5GB *should* be more than enough for the OS and apps (exluding games and personal files). I think I'm using half of the 4GB I've allotted to WinXP that I installed two or so years ago. I'm talking Office (with Access), Acrobat, Money, and plenty of goodies.

Be sure to put a page file on your main OS drive anyway, even if it 10MB fixed. This way, you'll still be able to boot your system if the other drive goes the way of the dodo. Should you not follow this advice, WinXP probably won't let you log in if that extra drive isn't present.

-SUO
 
Page file on a seperate physical drive than the OS adds performance especially if you have memory intensive situations. You can set page files on both OS and seperate drive and NT/2000/XP will use the right one for best performance.
 
This all seems like alot of work that will prolly result in no noticable performance gain.... Bottom line is hard drives are slow. When I say slow i mean so F'ing slow it dosn't matter where the page file is.

Has anyone done any benchmarks regarding issues like this?
 
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