Recommended swap partition / page file usage

[CoinOperatedBoy]

I currently have the following drives in my system (other specs in the link in my sig):

SATAI Maxtor 200GB
SATAII Seagate 500GB
SATAII WD Green 1TB
SATAII WD Black 640GB (new)

The Maxtor is (unfortunately) my current system drive. I have Windows XP on one partition, programs on another, and have been dabbling with Vista on a third. I have swap partitions on both the other drives where I've allocated Windows page files. I primarily use the Seagate 500GB for data I access regularly (music, documents, media I stream elsewhere). The WD 1TB I use for backups and archiving.

I just picked up the WD 640GB to replace the aging Maxtor as my system drive and I'm hoping for a noticeable performance difference. I'll probably use the Maxtor in an old rig or throw it in an external enclosure.

My question is: What would be the best way to utilize my storage options here?

Should I stick with a strategy similar to what I've been using? Is it still advisable to offload the page file / temp directory to drives other than the one on which Windows is installed? I've read others boasting of RAID 0-like increases when the page file is spread out like this. I honestly did not notice a significant performance increase when I did this before, but my system disk was already slow.

It's also worth noting that I have 6GB of RAM. I've heard that with Vista's memory management, it may be worth foregoing the page file altogether on systems with 4GB+. Others suggest leaving the default page file behavior since the OS may not page with that much RAM anyway. If I make Vista my primary OS, what's the best way to go?

Edit: I realize this may be more of an OS question than storage, but I'm also concerned with performance directly related to my hardware...

 

[zagood]

In Vista with 4gb, I saw no change in benchmarks (or everyday use) when I set up swap partitions on a HDD on a dif. channel as compared to just letting the OS manage the pagefile.

XP, yeah, if you do it right it can reasonably help response times when you're paging a lot, but not Vista with 4gb as far as I've seen (never tested with less).

-z

 

[Blain]

Set your "Initial size" and "Maximum size" to 4000MB.

 

[theAnimal]

Let Windows manage it.

 

[zerocool84]

I always let Windows manage it and NEVER turn off page filing. Turning it off can cause instability in some cases and does not make it any faster cus some programs need the page file.

 

[CoinOperatedBoy]

Thanks for the input, guys. I got the new drive up and running last night and installed Vista. Seems pretty snappy, but I haven't run any benchmarks yet. As for the page file --

Originally posted by: Blain
Set your "Initial size" and "Maximum size" to 4000MB.

Can you provide some reasoning for this? I was under the impression that, at the very least, the page file should be as large as the amount of RAM you have. Most things I've read have suggested RAM + 500MB or RAM x 1.5 if one plans to manually set the size of the page file. Maybe this isn't as important when you exceed 4GB? I haven't had the chance to monitor my page file usage on auto settings, but I imagine that would help here.

For now, I've gotten rid of my old swap partitions on the other drives and I'm letting Vista manage the page file on the new WD only. I'll run HD Tach / HD Tune later and if my Seagate provides anywhere near the access times of the WD, I might set up a second page file there and see if I notice any difference.