how do I get a GOOD page file

[Ponch]

I've installed Windows quite a few times and seen all sorts of page files, now this time after a clean install, the page file is at 2/3 of the C drive when there's plenty of space at the beginning of it. Changing it to D, defragging and back to C doesn't change much. I'm a little bit frustrated. I know the difference in speed wouldn't be enormous but I've seen some XP with a nice clean page file in one block right at the beginning of the partition and I was wondering if someone had a trick to do that ? Oh, and also why does XP think it should put that file at that place when there's no data before (disk is reformatted and the partition 15Gig) ?

[Yzöwl]

What makes you think that the beginning of the disk is the best location for the swap file?

[severach]

PAGEDFRG from SysInternals will get you the swapfile in one piece. PAGEDFRG always places any file it moves half way through the drive.

[gosh]

If you want speed just upgrade your ram to 2 gigs then dont use a pagefile. That's what i do and it runs very fast.

-gosh

[Ponch]

What makes you think that the beginning of the disk is the best location for the swap file?

Because it is faster. It would obviously be the best location for "any" file and with more than 80 free space, they should be there IMHO.

And Gosh, I want the speed that's paid for, not just "more" speed. There's no point investing in this 3 year old PC, unless you can send gift$ to every poster.

[cluberti]

Having a paging file at the beginning of the disk (the outer sectors of the platter) is actually faster (not by much, mind you, but it is faster). Here's an older article talking about why sectors on the edge of the disk platter can be accessed faster than inner sectors of the platter, although the differences are likely not as great now (speed-wise) as they were a few years ago, when the article was written. Having files stored in sectors at the beginning of a disk (at the edge of the platter) does indeed allow faster disk head access to the sectors holding those files than would be if they were in the middle or end of a platter, but again, the performance difference is likely very small unless you have a slower laptop drive (7200, or especially 10K RPM drives, probably wouldn't show a noticeable difference in day-to-day speed to the page file no matter where it was on disk).

It's important to note that one of the main reasons that the built-in defrag engine in Windows doesn't move the page file to the beginning of a volume is due to the MFT slack space reserved for MFT growth, which is located at the beginning of a volume (it's a set size, based on volume size) and no one is "allowed" to overwrite this space unless there's nowhere else on disk to write a file when a write occurs - in which case the MFT can give up some of it's slack space for the write. Also, since the default setting for the page file is dynamic, the OS doesn't assume that you'll specify a max size for the paging file and move the MFT slack space, and thus it does assume your page file may grow at some point and thus it cannot be before the MFT or MFT slack space in this scenario (because this should never move, technically) without the guarantee that the page file will defrag, which Windows does try to avoid (although poorly). Also note that while having the page file at the beginning of a volume will speed up access to those sectors, it won't make your seek time faster, so actually reading and writing to those sectors isn't going to be faster, just getting the head there when your disk does find that the page file is there will be (and coming back to files the OS uses more, like the MFT and system files, will be "slower" because THEY aren't near the beginning of the disk ).

All in all, the most important part of this is that the page file be defragmented and in one contiguous file to increase speed and reduce seeks for sections of the page file in different physical disk locations, but the actual physical location of the page file on disk really shouldn't matter as far as perceptible speed unless you have slower disk drives. I'll state it again - location of the paging file (especially if you have a lot of RAM and a small page file to limit the possibility of a commit of VA to RAM) really shouldn't matter much if you have faster IDE disk drives, but if you really want to move the page file to the beginning of a drive, though, I know of no free utilities to do this. Diskeeper (pro versions), UltimateDefrag, Norton SpeedDisk, and possibly O&O defrag can do this, but none are free.

[Yzöwl]

What makes you think that the beginning of the disk is the best location for the swap file?

Because it is faster. It would obviously be the best location for "any" file and with more than 80 free space, they should be there IMHO.

My point remains, what particular reason do you have to require your swap file at the fastest part of the disk. You need to look at your actual swap file usage, if it is being used often enough for its disk location to make any real difference, i.e. accessed most frequently, then you should really be looking at increasing your RAM as suggested by gosh!

BTW thanks cluberti for your input and saving me a large amount of typing!

[Ponch]

Thanks Cluberti indeed, I'll read that again after my 3rd coffee.

Yzöwl, I was just asking. I still can't understand why that file is placed at two thirds of an empty drive at first. And I still think it shouldn't. But I won't discuss further as this is not making much difference anyway.

[cluberti]

Thanks Cluberti indeed, I'll read that again after my 3rd coffee.

Cool - further questions, just ask.