Paging File Location?

Published on November 30, 2006 By Threi In PC Hardware

this is a continuation of my previous post about the ram...well now i have 1gb ram and i decided to use the paging file again, but here is the dilemma

for ease, i will refer to my hard drives by their names on my computer so for reference:

C: 14.9gb total, 6.88gb free (system drive)
D: 42.2gb total. 12.6gb free (games drive)
F: 18.9gb total, 8.33gb free (music drive)

C: and D: are partitions of one physical hard drive, ata133 but 7200rpm
F: is an older hard drive i use for storage only, and it is ata100 and 5200rpm.

For what i read there is a myth that your system will benefit from a performance increase if you put the page file on a slower hard drive, however im kind of sceptical of that because i havent received a proper explination for it so as it is right now my page file is configured like so:

1024mb on C:
512mb on F:

my question is if there an optimal configuration for my paging file based on the data i have given you? (for an overall system performance increase, not just an increase in one part.)

Comments

Fuzzy Logic

on Nov 30, 2006

The only performance increase will come from putting the page file on a different hard drive to your system. The difference between your drives isn't that great, so I'd stick it on F. If you can spare the space set it at 2048Mb.

Fuzzy Logic

on Nov 30, 2006

I forgot to add, the performance increase is because you'll have one drive accessing data and the other accessing the page file instead of one drive trying to do both. A drive head can only be in one place at once

Threi

on Nov 30, 2006

thank uuuuuuuuuuu

Kevin_C

on Dec 01, 2006

Well, that's partially true.. Are the drives on different physical controllers on your mobo? If so, then that is true, however if they are on the same controller the benefit might be offset by the fact that the controller can only write to or read from a single disk at a time.

Phoon

on Dec 01, 2006

the space set it at 2048Mb

I thought it was supposed to be set at a static value (min and max) equal to 1.5 times your physical memory. In this particular case, that amount would be 1536MB.
Also keep in mind that if you want to use the system restore feature of windowsxp you must have some page file on drive c.

Threi

on Dec 01, 2006

well i always turn system restore off anyways, and yes the two hard drives are on the same controller (i can put them on a different controller if it improves performance)

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