Swap file set-up

[Chasim]

I'm using WinXP Home sp2. I want to set-up a swap (page) file on a different hard drive. I know where to configure the page file in the settings, my only question is do I need to do anything special to the drive where the file will be?

My plan is to set up a 2 gig partition on the other drive, formatted NTFS, and do nothing else. Then I'll redirect WinXP to use that drive/partition for the page file location. I'm making the partition 2 gigs as I have 1 gig of memory and will make the page file maximum 1.5 gigs.

Thanks.

 

[n0cmonkey]

Sounds like a lot of work for little to no benefit...

 

[Haden]

You don't have to do anything special, your plan is ok.

 

[Nothinman]

My plan is to set up a 2 gig partition on the other drive, formatted NTFS, and do nothing else

Which is a waste of a partition and if you create another partition for data you'll just end up causing more slowdown should you ever use that pagefile as you'll be increasing seek times with reads jumping between those partitions.

 

[Chasim]

Well, both drives are WD Raptors (SATA 10,000 RPM). The drive on which I plan to place the page file has space availble and (with PartitionMagic) creating the new partition is easy.

I know what I really should do to boost performance (for gaming) is set up a RAID, but I just don't have the time to figure that all out right now.

So, I guess my only remaining question is I'll move the swap file if it will provide ANY benefit, but I certainly don't want to do it if it will slow things down... For what it's worth, I'm running WoW on the highest settings, with various Add-Ons which slow things down; it just seems that my hard drive is working hard and I'm hoping moving the paging file might help. (Adding more memory is an option, except that I can't get a second gig to run stable).

Thanks.

 

[Nothinman]

If you have a gig of memory I highly doubt the pagefile is your problem, but I admit that I don't know much about WoW.

 

[Navid]

I have not played WoW either. But, generally, the hard drive speed is only going to affect the loading time of the maps. That happens when you move from one area of the game to another.
While you are playing a game (FPS), the speed is determined by your graphics card and CPU and memory. RAID is not going to help.

There is some information about setting up a pagefile here for reference.
http://support.microsoft.com/d...x?scid=kb;en-us;314482

As that page suggests, I don't think you can make things worse as long as what is on the rest of that other drive is low traffic (like backup files and storage that you may occasionally need).

Whether you would imrove things or not depends on the ammount of memory you have and the type of applications you run.
If you run image editing software and deal with very large files, then, you will use a swap space (pagefile) and can benefit from optimizing it.

 

[Netopia]

I usually set up a seperate partition for the swap file, but for different reasons.

I make an NTFS partition of about double my RAM size.

I then name it P: (for paging... whatever). I create a pagefile on that partition with a minimum size of 1.5x my RAM and going up to the partition size minus 5 megs (biggest you can do).

After that I reset the pagefile on my C: drive down to 16MB (again... don't know why... just so there's something there if the other partition ever craps out).

Then I use TweakUI to hide the P: drive from My Computer so it isn't a "clutter".

The whole reason I do all of this is that I have to keep copies of the ghost images for a LOT of machines, and since they are all NTFS partitions, I don't have the luxury of telling Ghost to ignore pagefile.sys. Not having the pagefile on the C: drive make for much smaller ghost images for me.

Performance difference? Probably ZERO either direction! About the only thing I can think of is that perhaps if someone is using something that maxes out the pagefile, there isn't any fragmentation since nothing else is on the partition.

Joe

 

[Nothinman]

The whole reason I do all of this is that I have to keep copies of the ghost images for a LOT of machines, and since they are all NTFS partitions, I don't have the luxury of telling Ghost to ignore pagefile.sys.

Ghost knows to ignore pagefile.sys without you telling it anything.

 

[Netopia]

It was my understanding that it would ignore pagefile.sys only if you were using FAT.

Hmmm.... just read a FAQ that says that Ghost copies several files but not thier contents (like hyber.sys and pagefile.sys) so that a lot of space is saved. Unfortunately, that FAQ was for Ghost 2003 and I have Ghost 7.5 ... I'll have to do some research and see what 7.5 is capable of. I started doing this something like 5-7 years ago because it DIDN'T do it then (IIRC)... but I might have missed something.

I'll have to check it out! I could save myself a lot of time and effort if my version of Ghost does this "empty file" thing.

Thanks,

Joe

 

[DarkTXKnight]

Ghost 7.5 works the same way . It only copies the files but not the contents. Has been this way since 7.0 corporate

 

[Netopia]

SWEET!

Just saved me a bunch of time and effort!

Joe

 

[Wyck]

Conceptually it's beneficial to have the page file on a very fast drive which is used for little-or-nothing else. Should your little WinXP box have illusions of being a corporate database server, it would certainly boost its self esteem being configured that way. If your biggest problem is in a game that does a lot of HDD accessing (loading parts of levels in realtime, etc), put the swap file on a different drive than the game. And don't worry about giving it its own partition unless you expect to fill up the drive. It would just add overhead.

...And does WoW really eat up a gig of RAM? Holy hell man.