Answer me this....

[Dirk Diggler]

Usually the spare drives we have lying around are old (relative) and therefore slower, which in turn slows the Paging to and from the drive, which in turn slows your system down.
The Paging File should be on the fastest drive, preferably in the middle of the drive if short of RAM, or on the ouside edge if plenty of RAM.
If it is truly a spare drive set the minimum for the Paging File at the same amount of RAM and set the maximum as big as the drive.

[Stripe]

Man!!! I got to try this...I just placed a 120GB on my sys....

I'm gonna try a LARGE page file and see what happens

[FBM357]

Originally posted by Dirk Diggler
Usually the spare drives we have lying around are old (relative) and therefore slower, which in turn slows the Paging to and from the drive, which in turn slows your system down.
The Paging File should be on the fastest drive, preferably in the middle of the drive if short of RAM, or on the ouside edge if plenty of RAM.
If it is truly a spare drive set the minimum for the Paging File at the same amount of RAM and set the maximum as big as the drive.

I've a spare 20 gig/7200 rpm drive that I'll use. Is this not sufficient?

[Dehcbad25]

I have no spare drives All five drives totaling 300GB are being used (no time to clean the junk out)
Anyway, I tried this and moved the page file to 3 drives, which are not in used generally, and I did see a gaining, but I didn't benchmark it

[Dirk Diggler]

FBM, I think a 20 gig Paging file is maybe a little on the extreme side of thinking, but hey if its doing nowt, do it.

[FBM357]

Originally posted by Dirk Diggler
FBM, I think a 20 gig Paging file is maybe a little on the extreme side of thinking, but hey if its doing nowt, do it.

LOL, I'm not using the entire drive for the page file. It's the smallest drive I have available... LOL (like a 32 waist trying on a pair of size 72 pants)

[Big Booger]

I tried this monster page file thing...
it would only let me set it to 4096MB...

Any ideas about that?

[Dirk Diggler]

That would be a FAT32 limitation, try using NTFS and see if you can up the size.

[Big Booger]

ahh, it had to be the one drive the one drive that I formatted with fat32
hehehe

[perris]

here's some info for everybody to consider

first, even with ntfs, 4096 is the max

second, with a good amount of ram, you are never accessing the pagefile, so the performance of the pagefile matters not a bit

third, if you put your swap on a small drive, then the heads have to pass more calendars which will counter the effectiveness of faster seek times...probably a wash.

4th, if you are on a single physical drive, the heads are for the majority of the time on the "c" partition, and that's where the swap belongs i n my opinion and experience, though I've read ms documentation that suggests there might be a performance gain by putting the swap on a separate partition, in my opinion, the only performance gain comes from the contiguous nature of the partition, since xp cannot defrag the pf

however, now with pagefile defragers available, taking the pf off the os partition will slow you down, IF you are short on ram and are accessing the pagefile often