Issue with Windows 8 sharing HDD partition for pagefile

[SBMongoos]

It appears that I've made a stupid mistake. I have an ICY dock that holds three HDDs. I only operate two of the drives at once. One for the OS and the second is partitioned so one partition is for the pagefile and the other partition is for file storage and data backups.

Here's my problem: When I shutdown and then swap out my Win 7 Pro HDD for my Win 8 Pro HDD. When Win 8 Pro boots it's been trying to do a repair that it fails on (no options work accept a image restore from a backup using Acronis). I believe this is do to an over site on my part as the second HDD that has the pagfile partition isn't big enough to store a pagefile for both Win 7 Pro and Win 8 Pro and the OS's are different enough they cannot share the same pagefile (my bad idea) even though I have it set to the same size in both OS's.

I would think the only way to fix this would be to increase the size of the partition on the HDD that has the pagefile partition(s). What program do you recommend that I can make this change with that won't destroy my data on the other partition of this second HDD? It appears I can just use Win 7 Pro and Disk Management to shrink and expand partitions as I need.

I find it interesting that when I swap back to Win 7 Pro it catches this and runs checkdisk on the pagefile partition and the problem is simply solved. However, when I go the other way Win 8 Pro tries to repair and it cannot with any option. I restore from an image file.

 

[Demon10000]

Curious: what is the point of putting the page file on a separate partition? Is it to save space by trying to get Win7 and Win8 to use the same page file?

I can't say that I have much experience in sharing the page file between multiple operating systems... I don't know if I'd even bother trying unless you've got a small SSD?

If you're going for speed or performance, putting the file on another partition isn't really going to help much because it's still coming off the same disk...

 

[B00nie]

Curious: what is the point of putting the page file on a separate partition? Is it to save space by trying to get Win7 and Win8 to use the same page file?

I can't say that I have much experience in sharing the page file between multiple operating systems... I don't know if I'd even bother trying unless you've got a small SSD?

If you're going for speed or performance, putting the file on another partition isn't really going to help much because it's still coming off the same disk...

He's probably trying to save his main partition from fragmentation. Or he misunderstood the instructions of putting the swap to another _drive_.

 

[SBMongoos]

Curious: what is the point of putting the page file on a separate partition? Is it to save space by trying to get Win7 and Win8 to use the same page file?

I can't say that I have much experience in sharing the page file between multiple operating systems... I don't know if I'd even bother trying unless you've got a small SSD?

If you're going for speed or performance, putting the file on another partition isn't really going to help much because it's still coming off the same disk...

The pagefile resides on the second physcial HDD so it improves performance. The fact that I overlooked not making the size of this partition larger to accommodate both pagefiles is my error. These drives are not SSDs.

 

[primetime]

Whats the point of the 2 different os's? I haven't seen a need for win 7 in a long time myself...was just wondering as newest win 8.1 update 1 is all i use nowadays but im sure you have your reasons

 

[Carouselambra]

Windows 7 and 8 allow you to modify the partition size through disk management. If there is no unallocated space you will need to reduce the size of another partition first. Then take the newly unallocated space and add it to your "paging partition".

 

[bigdogchris]

The pagefile resides on the second physcial HDD so it improves performance.

Moving the page file to another disk, itself, doesn't necessarily improve performance. Due to the type of activity the PF receives (mostly random, small reads and writes), it's best suited for the drive with the fastest access time and lowest latency. SSD if you have one.

 

[SBMongoos]

Whats the point of the 2 different os's? I haven't seen a need for win 7 in a long time myself...was just wondering as newest win 8.1 update 1 is all i use nowadays but im sure you have your reasons

Because. I prefer to work in 7 Pro and then when I have time I swap out the HDD and play in Win 8.

 

[SBMongoos]

Moving the page file to another disk, itself, doesn't necessarily improve performance. Due to the type of activity the PF receives (mostly random, small reads and writes), it's best suited for the drive with the fastest access time and lowest latency. SSD if you have one.

No SSDs (not yet anyway). Both HDDs have the same 7200 RPM. However, I did recently make the Win 7 Pro disc a Seagate Hybrid.

 

[SBMongoos]

Windows 7 and 8 allow you to modify the partition size through disk management. If there is no unallocated space you will need to reduce the size of another partition first. Then take the newly unallocated space and add it to your "paging partition".

This is what I thought. This being the case it seems obvious, then, that no existing data will be affected. Correct?

 

[Carouselambra]

I've never had issues with shrinking a volume. I believe it would warn you if you are cutting into space that is allocated to something else. IE. the paging file

 

[Demon10000]

The pagefile resides on the second physcial HDD so it improves performance. The fact that I overlooked not making the size of this partition larger to accommodate both pagefiles is my error. These drives are not SSDs.

Not to drag this topic out, but you aren't going to get any performance boost by offloading to a different partition on the same disk. If you want to optimize this, I'd put your Win8 pagefile on a partition on your win7 disk, and your win7 page file on a partition on your win8 disk. This way, you're offloading the io to two different disks. That will get you some theoretical performance boosts that you probably won't notice, especially if neither of the disks are SSDs.


I've seen people do this type of thing for years, and it doesn't work like they think. I remember people making two partitions on a drive -- one for the OS and one for data, and the reason was to make accessing the data faster. It really doesn't matter since both partitions are on the same drive, the data has to take the same path regardless of the partition. Now, I know we can optimize the data by forcing it to certain spots on the disk... but, I don't think thats happening here...

 

[B00nie]

I've seen people do this type of thing for years, and it doesn't work like they think. I remember people making two partitions on a drive -- one for the OS and one for data, and the reason was to make accessing the data faster. It really doesn't matter since both partitions are on the same drive, the data has to take the same path regardless of the partition. Now, I know we can optimize the data by forcing it to certain spots on the disk... but, I don't think thats happening here...

The reason why the OS and data are good to split into separate partitions are obvious - you can format the OS partition at will without losing your data. Having only one partition makes fixing your OS a lot harder.

Restoring stuff from backups is cumbersome and slow, if you even have one that is! Most people don't.

 

[B00nie]

Moving the page file to another disk, itself, doesn't necessarily improve performance. Due to the type of activity the PF receives (mostly random, small reads and writes), it's best suited for the drive with the fastest access time and lowest latency. SSD if you have one.

The irony is that small frequent random writes are the most detrimental to your SSD life.

 

[Sgraffite]

The irony is that small frequent random writes are the most detrimental to your SSD life.

Don't you mean large frequent writes regardless of being random/sequential in nature are the most detrimental to your SSD's life?

 

[SBMongoos]

Not to drag this topic out, but you aren't going to get any performance boost by offloading to a different partition on the same disk. If you want to optimize this, I'd put your Win8 pagefile on a partition on your win7 disk, and your win7 page file on a partition on your win8 disk. This way, you're offloading the io to two different disks. That will get you some theoretical performance boosts that you probably won't notice, especially if neither of the disks are SSDs.


I've seen people do this type of thing for years, and it doesn't work like they think. I remember people making two partitions on a drive -- one for the OS and one for data, and the reason was to make accessing the data faster. It really doesn't matter since both partitions are on the same drive, the data has to take the same path regardless of the partition. Now, I know we can optimize the data by forcing it to certain spots on the disk... but, I don't think thats happening here...

You're right and I've already addressed this with someone else. The pagefile is on another HDD not the same. It's an ICY Dock that can hold three HDDs. HDD 1 (Win 7 Pro) and HDD 2 is partitioned for the pagefile and backups. HDD 3 is Win 8 Pro. I swap between HDD 1 and HDD 3 depending on which OS I want to run. Both 1 and 3 use a dedicated partition on HDD 2 for the pagefile (as I stated originally I didn't make this partition big enough [as I hadn't planned on it at the time]). The other partition on HDD 2 is for backup storage.

 

[B00nie]

Don't you mean large frequent writes regardless of being random/sequential in nature are the most detrimental to your SSD's life?

No, tiny writes create stale blocks the most efficiently if they can't be combined. This causes much more work for trim and garbage collection than writing larger files less frequently.

Tiny writes are much more detrimental in comparison since a tiny write will occupy a minimum of 4-8kb page (or even larger depending on the SSD model) regardless of its size. Basically one can get the whole drive into a stale state by pushing 10% of the drive capacity in microwrites. Micron brieflet on writes and pages

 

[Sgraffite]

No, tiny writes create stale blocks the most efficiently if they can't be combined. This causes much more work for trim and garbage collection than writing larger files less frequently.

Tiny writes are much more detrimental in comparison since a tiny write will occupy a minimum of 4-8kb page (or even larger depending on the SSD model) regardless of its size. Basically one can get the whole drive into a stale state by pushing 10% of the drive capacity in microwrites. Micron brieflet on writes and pages

I consider wearing out the drive more quickly to be more detrimental than making trim and garbage collection work harder, so I suppose it depends on your definition.

 

[B00nie]

I consider wearing out the drive more quickly to be more detrimental than making trim and garbage collection work harder, so I suppose it depends on your definition.

The drive does wear out faster when the garbage collection has to empty the stale pages, it's equivalent to writing them full.

So if you write 100 000 1kb writes you wear the drive down as much as 100 000 4kb writes. That's a lot of wear especially considering that the page file is thrashed constantly even when the system still has ram to spare.

The more microwrites you do the more fragmented the drive gets and the more cleaning up it requires from the controller. Sequential writes are much easyer for the drive as is explained in the Micron document I supplied.

 

[bigdogchris]

I redirect all of my user documents to a HDD so my SSD receives very little writes other than installing software.

 

[SBMongoos]

Windows 7 and 8 allow you to modify the partition size through disk management. If there is no unallocated space you will need to reduce the size of another partition first. Then take the newly unallocated space and add it to your "paging partition".

Done. I opted to split HDD 2 into three partitions. On HDD 2 there is a partition for a pagefile for each OS and the partition for files and data backups. I just had to reboot each OS on their respective HDD and check the drive letter assignment but all looks well. HDD 1 = Win7 Pro OS, HDD 2 = 1 pagefile partition for Win7 and 1 for Win8 and a partition for files and data backups and HDD 3 = Win8 Pro OS.

As simple as this concept is I'm not sure it's going to work. I may be running into issues with partitions between the two OS's even though they can see "what is what". Going back after additional reboots is looking like the two OS's may not be able to keep track of the partition layout. I'll have to see but it's questionable at the moment. You would think just one simple pagefile partition for both OS's would be enough. Tired..time to stop.