[question] putting pagefile on 2nd HDD

[E-66]

I've been reading over various partitioning strategies the past few days, and for an upcoming build the one I'm currently leaning towards is one that puts the pagefile on the first partition of a 2nd HDD. My main reason for doing it isn't necessarily to get a performance gain, but to cut down on fragmentation and to cut down on the amount of space the OS takes up, thereby making my Ghost images smaller.

I haven't purchased the HDDs yet, but I was thinking of getting a 74 GB WD Raptor as the main HDD. If I put the pagefile on a slower 7200 rpm drive, will that compromise the speed of the main HDD in any way?

[McTavish]

The page file is never included in images of an OS, so no need to move it for that reason. If it gets in the way when defragging just turn it off (as long as you have at least 512megs of ram) during defrag and then back on when finished. It usually then positions itself in one block just a bit after the other files.

Don’t really know the answer to your last question, but I would imagine you would loose a bit on the slower drive but gain a bit from it being on that another drive. So perhaps no advantage either way.

Edit: Better add a warning for any 2K users reading this - never turn off your pagefile.

Edited December 15, 2006 by McTavish

[cluberti]

Note that there are also applications that require a pagefile to function (take a look at this thread, for example).

[HyperHacker]

It depends too how you set up the drives and what you're doing. With IDE you have two disks per channel, and both disks will run at the speed of the slower one. Thus I like to put my fastest HD on its own channel, and the slower ones on the same channel as the optical drive.

If you're loading/saving huge files into/out of memory, then the faster disk is going to have to slow down as you'll essentially be copying data from it to the slower one or vice-versa. If you're doing things that use a lot of memory but not big files, then your main HD won't be involved at all, only the swap file.