Seperate HD for swap file?? Even if it is a slower HD??

[aircooled]

Win 2000 system.
I have 2 HD's in my system. My main one is a WD 20gig ATA/66 7200rpm. My secondary is a WD 7.5gig UDMA66 4500 rpm.

Am I better off leaving the swap file on the faster drive that contains windows or on the slower drive that is on a completely seperate channel?

I have win2k and 256mb RAM.

Thanks!

 

[setaanbomb]

I know for sure that placing the Swap file on another physical hard drive will boost performance, but a 4500RPM? Don't expect much.

 

[Vegito]

Yeap, placing it on another drive increase performance... but not sure how much..

 

[TomC25]

How about if you have the swap file on another partition - is that like having a seperate physical hard drive?

I have Windows on one partition and programs & swap on another with the rest another partition for storage (45GB Western Digital)

So, does having the swap on that partition give better performance

 

[SUOrangeman]

On the same drive, but in a different partition? Possibly not.

Why? Well, when you are swapping a lot, the drive heads have to frequently move from the partition with the swap file to the partition where you are actually working on your files (say, where you load programs from or you documents).

Make a little bit of sense? Yes, this may seem a bit different front what is stated in my dissertation. In the dissertation (and in my one-drive systems), I prefer the flexibility of using the same swap space for WinME and Win2K over the most optimized route (have separate swap space, but within the system volumes of each OS).

-SUO

 

[Pariah]

Definitely leave the swap on the 7200RPM drive. The only benefit to creating a seperate partition for the swap file is to keep it from getting fragemented. If you declare a static swap file, then you will see no benefit from a seperated partition.