Separate partition for the paging file?

it is pointless . if it's on the same disk regardless of partition, it doesn't matter. If you have 2 drives there MAY be a benefit in moving it to a second drive.. but even that is minor with today's sytem speeds. If anyone cares to disagree i'm open to it.. providing you have benchmarks.

I agree completely with you on this one. I think seek times depend on the speed of your harddrive and less on the partition. It depends more on where that particular file is written on your disk I.E. front or back depending on how much space your using. As I understand the NTFS is supposed to be a lot more efficient than fat16 or 32 and therefore require less defraging.

No.

If files will get fragmented on your C: drive, they will get fragmented. The existance of a 1GB to 2GB file will not affect fragmentation of other files.

The pagefile itself may get fragmented, but just a single run of Defrag should set it back to defragged state for quite some time.

As mentioned by Hooligan, creating another partition on the same physical disk will not give you any performance benefits.

If you are experiencing a lot of paging-to-disk, then the best performance boost you can invest in is to upgrade your RAM to 1GB or 2GB. If you have enough RAM, you will *never* need to page to disk, and this question becomes moot.

i have 1 gig of ram, never, or hardly never use it all, but windows uses the paging file anyways correct?

it always allocates the space.. something you can disable by setting a rediculously small one some programs my bitch about it tho.

There have been long discussion all over the internet about this. However, you should not completely remove the paging file (or set it too low). I don't know about you, but when I'm working on my computer, I have about 8 apps open at once. Add in open files on each app, background processes, etc and you're getting pretty close to your RAM limit. May only happen once in a blue moon, but it would suck to have a blue screen because you ran out of RAM+virtual memory.

Regards,

zakaluka2.

I have the swap file on a separate FAT partition, but that has more to do with the fact that now it's placed before everything else on the disk, which is supposed to help the speed (likely in the magnitude of some 0,00001% or a similar useless number :X )... I see no downside to it, as such, but there's hardly any need to go out of your way to to move it. At least it's not cluttering any of my "real" drives now. It *is* a rather big file.

Even that is a tradeoff. In general, you want any data structures that are most frequently accessed to reside in the middle of the disk, so that when you're off doing things at either end of the disk, you get decent seek times back to the middle when you need it. This means you ideally want your directory structures in the middle. When the paging file is not used heavily, it won't make much difference, but if you're low on RAM and the paging file is getting a lot of heavy use, things may go faster with it in the middle of the disk...

Dunno, apparently there are as many schools of thought as there are with any issue...

Instead of letting windows manage the paging file, set a min and max size that are the same, then defrag the drive including the page file. This will create a fixed page file that won't defragment.

If you create a seperate partition for the VM and make the partition the same size as the VM, it will make it completely "unfragmentable" (Did I just make a word? ). Performance gains strictly from being on a seperate partition will not be seen. Obviously, it will help with performance due to the fact it cannot become fragmented. Also, traditionally, the middle area of a disk is typically the fastest. If possible put it there. EX.: Main partition in first part(OS, installed files, etc), swap file partition in the middle part, and some other partition in the end (another OS or perhaps just a store partition for documents, downloaded files, pictures, etc you need to keep in the event of reformat).

One reason it became popular on desktops was for people with multiple drives. If you put the partition on a completely seperate IDE channel, then you benefit not only from not being to become fragmented, but from your PC being able to access typical HD files and your swap files literally simultaneously. This removed one bottleneck from the typical I/O subsystem. When just using a seperate partion on the same IDE channel (or another drive on the same IDE channel), you don't benefit from this.

In short, yes it will keep it from becoming fragmented. However, performance gains will not be tangible.

Why in the world would you want a file that wouldn't defragment?

Having multiple drives in most of my systems, I have toyed around with the idea of seperating the page file from the rest of the file system.

I would love to load up my system with RAM, and have no page file, but I think Window$ would hate me for doing the unthinkable. Also, having only slots for 4gbs of ram, this would prob be impossible.

Thx for starting this very interesting topic, and I am curious to see what other people have done/thought of doing with thier file systems.


^_^_^

Windows (2000/XP) will always page regardless of how much RAM you have. Idle processes have some of their working set paged out to disk to free up physical RAM for other processes. Even the Windows executive is paged out to file (although you can set a Reg tweak to disable paging executive, which *does* result in performance gain, but I would not recommend this with less than 1 GB of RAM).

Others here are exactly right. In an age of RAM and hard drive sizes that handily exceed what 90% of users need, set your pagefile to 1.5X physical RAM size for both min and max size. I do this as the very first thing after building any new system so the partition is still nice and empty and you can create a pagefile that is contiguous (i.e. all in one piece rather than two or three or more big chunks if you do this after installing apps and cluttering up the partition - note that leaving min and max size different also runs the risk that as pagefile grows Windows will put a chunk here, a chunk there, and as you write to or read from pagefile your hard drive head might have to bounce all over the drive...).

Putting the pagefile on a separate physical drive - why not if you have the drive? BUT this is only worth it on a separate physical drive that is *** not on the same IDE channel as your primary drive ***. IDE controllers can only read from/write to one device at a time on the IDE channel (i.e. not to both devices at the same time, unlike SCSI), so if you have primary HDD and secondary HDD on the same channel then you still get no performance advantage from putting pagefile onto secondary physical HDD. On a laptop it is pretty much up to the laptop manufacturer whether secondary HDD is on same channel as primary HDD. My laptop has a "modular bay" inside that is in secondary IDE channel, so I am lucky in that my HDDs are split across channels.

All this, BTW, is why SATA and SCSI are far superior to IDE. SCSI is the best (and priciest) while for "normal" (i.e. non workstation/server) use SATA is fine and all other things being equal (i.e. same spindle speed etc.) is better than IDE. Plus the plugs are much smaller since you don't have to keep 40 wires synchronized as in IDE...

So what to do?

- Make pagefile min size = max size
- Make pagefile size = 1.5 X physical RAM size (if you plan to upgrade RAM in the future, make it 1.5 X final RAM size - no reason not to)
- if you have IDE devices on separate channels, by all means put the pagefile on the physical device that will see less routine I/O (i.e. away from Windows, games, applications)

Enjoy! From a fellow tweaker who enjoys squeezing every last bit of performance out of my systems...

Got me

i actualy totally disagree that page file should be 1.5 times ram. that was an old belief founded on old systems. at this point there is really no benefit to trying to manage your page file better then windows does.. UNLESS you use a diff drive (as you stated) and even then.. i'm not sure it's worth teh 5 min effort.