Will moving the swap file to a second harddrive get better performance?

[Gomez]

I'm running WIN98SE and have just purchased a new 30 gig harddrive to run with my old 20 gig drive.

30gig - Maxtor 7200RPM - DiamondMax 40 Plus
20gig - Western Digital 7200RPM - Caviar

I have them both on the Primary IDE Channel. I have an LS-120 Floppy and CDRW on the Secondary IDE Channel. The only thing I have on the 20 gig drive now is the windows swap file (set at 512mb / I'm running 128mb of RAM). Is this slowing me down or speeding me up?

I first thought it would speed me up but SiSoft Sandra and HDTach shows the performance of the Maxtor much less than the Western Digital drive. The reviews at Storagereview.com of these drives shows the the Maxtor should outperform the WD in all instances (which is why I bought it in the first place). DMA is enabled on both drives and is recognized by both the bios and Windows.

Any comments or suggestions are welcome.

thanks

 

[Klosters]

Folks say that one or the other works better for them. Personally, I take Adrian Wong's opinion as being well informed. He did a lot of careful benchmarking to suss out which is better. He says that putting the Swap File on a different drive than the Windows one slows down performance.

 

[ResearchEverything]

The official Microsoft stand point says that putting it on a seperate harddrive should improve performance. The closer to the beginning of the hard drive the better and don't put on a later partition than the first. You can try it and if nogo or slower, just move it back.

 

[Bglad]

Helps only if both drives are equally fast, both are on separate master ide channels and you get it at the beginning of the drive. Looks like you have it covered.

 

[eelw]

Placing the OS and swapfile on different drives helps, but to futher increase performance, you should both HD's on individual master channels.