Pagefile question - Not your typical idiot post

[dmo580]

I've done quite a bit of research and I know the best place to put my page file is on the MOST USED partition of the LEAST USED physical drive.

 

If people still wonder what that means, go ahead and ask me.

 

Basically, I have my page file on a 2nd drive (7200.9 drive instead of my Raptor) but I have heard the argument that you should keep a small page file (2 - 50mb) on your primary Windows drive, and the rest on your second drive.

 

So for example, I was told to put 2-50mb on C:, but the other 1.5gb on my other drive. Good or bad?

 

All I'm wondering is whether I should even bother with the 2-50mb or just go with the fat 1.5gb and thats all I need.

[Guest Kobalt]

Best thing is to have a small pagefile of size 64MB on boot drive. (this is used for windows when it crashes, and writes the dump files). Then on the other drive, use a pagefile that min=max, and if you have 1GB RAM, then 1GB is good enough, unless you load lots of stuff, then 1.5 or 2GB.

[dbilz]

With 2GB try running no pf system, I do it on my rig and its fine.

[red930]

Meh, I always just shut off the pagefile o my C drive and set up a 4GB pagefile on a separate partition.

 

Have more than enough space so I see no reason not to.

[red930]

There are apps that require a pagefile like Photoshop.

 

I always benchmark my drives and put the pagefile on the fastest.

[old_geekster]

I can guarantee that you can ask 100 people which is best and you will get 100 different answers on this question.

 

I have tried most all of the solutions and have found that it doesn't appear to make an appreciable difference which way I go. The fact is, as I once read on the Street, speed is in your mind.

 

With that said, most people in the know say to use a pagefile; no matter where it is located.

[Evil_inc]

I have 1.5 gigs pagefile on my os drive (as it is my only one). I have to do this as I only have 640mb ram and am currently using almost 2 gigs. The drive is 7200rpm and ata 133. I would NEVER recommend this to anyone as it really pisses me off all the time because the little light saying that things are being written to my hd is almost always on and it is slow as heck.

[Spyvie]

Back in the day I used to build NT3.51 servers with SCSI drives, I would always put a cheap IDE drive in the box and dedicate it to the swap file. The thinking was you only had so much bandwidth per controller, and it was best if Windows didn’t have to read OS or application/user files and then page memory on the same channel.

 

I dunno if it really worked, but it sounded good.

[OneArmed Badger]

If you have a page file on more than one physical drive then Windows uses both of them simultaneously. Its a similar technique to Raid and increases the throughput to the page file.

 

So in general you should have identically sized page files on each physical drive. But if you're running an application which uses lots of RAM and/or disk accesses then you may be better off not having a page file on the disk that its using.