Win XP Paging File Question

[mattyhayden]

Hi Guys,

Have a ggod question about where to put my paging file.

I have 2 x WD Raptors @ 10,000 Rpm in RAID 0 as "C" Drive and a 250Gig "D" Drive @ 7200 rpm

Still confused where to put it, as the speed of the raptors ect.

Its sitting on the "C" Drive at the moment...??

[Franky]

I think having it on C: would provied the best performance, since the raptors in RAID are fast.

[divided]

you want your page file on a diff physical drive than the os for better performance.

[supershanks]

I'd put it on D: see How to configure paging files for optimization and recovery in Windows XP for more info.

 

luck

[mattyhayden]

Will through it on the D Drive, Thanks Guys

[wevsspot]

I've got mine on my D drive. I'm also running two Raptors in RAID 0. I can't feel much (if any) performance difference with the paging file in either location. But moving it off of your OS drives onto another drive technically makes more sense. Remember, that for your hard drives to access the page file the read heads actually have to move from one disk location to the paging file location, and then back to the original location. Mechanically, they can only do that so fast. By moving your page file to a seperate disk, your read head on that disk can access your page file while the read heads on your OS disk array stay busy with other things (like reading or writing).

[Guest Crusader]

On a related note; I wonder what the ideal pagefile size is when you have 2 GB of RAM. Currently I'm using a pagefile of 3069 GB (min- en maxsize) on a different drive but I hear sometimes that with such an amount of RAM setting no pagefile at all is faster?

 

Or maybe I could set it a lot smaller?

 

Btw, 3069 MB is the optimal size that Windows advised.

[wevsspot]

You're hogging a ton of hard drive real estate with that page file size. I would never run anything above 1536 mb. A good rule of thumb, if you've been running your pc a while . . .

 

ctrl/alt/del

select task manager

select performance

take a look at the peak commit charge (that is the most memory you have ever had to use - remember it's being reported in kilobytes)

Take that peak commit charge and multiply it by 1.5 and use the result as your page file size

[divided]

you dont need a pagefile if you have 2 gigs of ram. the only time your page file is accessed is when you run out of physical memory and the como needs to store that data somewhere so it uses the harddrive. with 2 gigs youll never run out of mem. and if so the only time would be perhaps playing a game but when are you ever going to minimize the game to complete another task...so in your case you prob dont even need a page file.

 

 

edit: didnt see crusader was not the creater of this thread but this is to answer your question.

[Fight Game]

you dont need a pagefile if you have 2 gigs of ram. the only time your page file is accessed is when you run out of physical memory and the como needs to store that data somewhere so it uses the harddrive. with 2 gigs youll never run out of mem. and if so the only time would be perhaps playing a game but when are you ever going to minimize the game to complete another task...so in your case you prob dont even need a page file.

edit: didnt see crusader was not the creater of this thread but this is to answer your question.

 

 

Not true...Programs will use a paging file, even when you still have physical memory, and even if you disable the page file, windows will still create and use one behind your back. From the tons of benchmarks I've ran, and actually using different set-ups, I don't think it makes a difference, unless the drive you specify is very much slower. Typically you'd want it on the fastest drive, or a seperate drive, but your fastest drive is your c:. My suggestion is to put half on c: and half on d:. Depending on what you read where, and when, will tell you different things. But like I said, if the drives are newer drives and not something really slow, you won't see a difference. I play some hungry games, and use 1536. I think 768 on each drive would be as good as any.

I think it's microsoft themselves that say it will still use one behind your back, even if you have it disabled. And it was proven to me when, I disabled it, restarted, played a large game, then ran disk defragment - and there was the paging file, that was disabled.

[finagle69]

some games will refuse to run if no page file is present even if you have 4G of RAM. since that's what i use my computer for mainly, i HAVE to have a paging file.

[wevsspot]

Divided,

 

I disagree with your statement. Windows ALWAYS wants to use a paging file in some fashion. You can try and every trick in the book but it will still try and use a page file regardless of how much memory is actually in your rig. It's like it has a bad crack addiction.