Offline Defrag that can move pagefile.sys?

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vurt

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Anyone know of a defrag program that can move pagefile.sys to the outer tracks of the HDD for optimal performance?

Im using Ultimate Defrag and it has some nice options where you can select which files you want to be where on the HDD, but it cant move the most important file which is a bit disapointing to say the least. It has a "offline defrag", but it doesnt have any options.
 
You might try turning off your pagefile and rebooting, then defrag and turn pagefile back on and reboot again. This will move pagefile to outside. Hope this helps.
 
That doesnt work since if i turn it off and reboot the pagefile is gone, first thing i tried :) Thx anyways!
 
vurt said:
That doesnt work since if i turn it off and reboot the pagefile is gone, first thing i tried :) Thx anyways!
Click to expand...

1.Right click "My Computer" select "Properties"
2.Click on "Advanced" tab
3.Under "Performance" select "Settings"
4.Select "Advanced" tab
5.Under "Virtual Memory" click "Change"
6.Select "No Paging File" then click "Set"(Remember the settings for the pagefile size to put back in after you are finished)
7.Click "OK" Then "Apply"
8.Reboot and then defrag
9.After defragging, turn pagefile back on and reboot again.


This will move it to outside. It will not move it to very end on tracks on disc but will move to to end of written area.

To move it to physical outside of disc you might try to create a partition that will hold page file and create it on there and it will always be at the end of disc. Don't know if this will be better than end of written area or not. Perhaps somebody else can verify this?
 
yeah but i want it to the absolute outer tracks which are the best performance wise..

I tried tried defragging that drive from another system disk and it still wont move it to the outer tracks for some reason, other files works but not pagefile.sys even though it's not in use.
 
Can I just say its not that much of a gain. But I have heard that PerfectDisk will allow particular placement of the page file.
 
i have tried perfectdisk too, latest version it doesnt move the pagefile even if you do a offline defrag.

im sure the gain is minimal, but anyways.. i really like have optimal performance on everything :p
 
i remember that Norton Utilities had that option, but since i have 2Gb of RAM i pretty much don´t care about the swap
 
Unless you're using a 4200 or 5400 rpm hard drive for your system/OS drive, I seriously doubt you're going to see any noticeable improvement as far as paging activity, and even then the only time it would appear is in specific benchmarking to test for and spot such performance "boosts" as moving the pagefile to the outer edges.

I've done enough testing over the years with random, static, and placed pagefiles (putting them precisely where I want them on the platters) and in the long run, the only actual performance difference that was noted was by having the pagefile near the middle of the drive - seriously.

Since the heads on the actuator arm are typically all over the place on a hard drive as it is (take a peek at one of them in operation sometime with a Raptor-X drive or find a video on YouTube or someplace) you find that the heads spend more time along the middle regions of a platter than the inner or outer regions - and because of that, by placing the pagefile in those middle regions, access times to reach the pagefile for read/write operations is significantly decreased compared to having to move the actuator to the inner regions or the outer edges and then back again to the middle areas.

Even then, with the pagefile situated in the middle regions of a drive, the performance difference was barely 1-2% across the board - or across the platters, so to speak - in testing with Intel's IOMeter benchmark which is one of the most stressful in terms of hard drive activity.

So, my suggestion: Windows is doing just fine on its own. :) But tweak away if you feel the need to go for that 1-2%...
 
Every little bit helps - no pun intended. :)

But after doing this for so long, and spending so much wasted time going after that last little - ok, no more puns - boost of performance, I had to realize I was spending more time tweaking the machine(s) for high performance more than I was actually using that performance to get something done. :)

If you have two physical hard drives that aren't on the same cable (if they're IDE) you can improve performance quite noticeably by adding or simply moving the pagefile off the system drive to the second physical drive - by doing this, you leave the system drive for its normal operations, and anytime the OS needs to page for whatever reason, it doesn't have to fight for hard drive access on the system drive in between read/write operations. It can simply access the second drive at the same time and use the pagefile as required.

This tip only works in a situation with seperate physical hard drives, however, and drives on seperate IDE controllers, aka different cables.

If you've got a RAID setup, or if you've got multiple SATA drives, this tip can really make a difference you'll see in terms of overall responsiveness of the system, but if you're saddled with older ATA/IDE hard drives, they've got to be on seperate cables/controllers or you'll actually make things worse - ATA/IDE devices on the same cable can't both be accessed for any reason at the same time. Once they're on seperate cables, seperate controllers, then the magic of synchronous read/write cycles can happen.

Hope this helps...
 
Yes i know that tweak, to move it off the system drive.

My setup is like this:

Disk 1:

C-drive: windows, programfiles, pagefile.sys
D-drive: junk / temporary stuff, audio etc

Disk 2 (Raid0):

C: games

The problem with moving the pagefile off the c-drive to the raid0-disks would be that in HDD-intensive games (Oblivion for example) the HDD would have to read both the game, and in some cases, the pagefile.sys at the same time which could decrease the performance.

Now i have a pagefile on both c: and on e: because i've read (on microsoft site) that windows uses the pagefile that is optimal, so in this case (playing games) it would use pagefile on my non-raid drive. At least that is how i understand it works.

I have 2GB RAM as well, so this is just helping in rare cases. But since windows is created in the way that it is, that it "needs" a pagefile no matter how much RAM you have, i wanted to tweak this setting.
 
I gotta give you credit with that last posting:

You stated more fact than 99.9% of the people that frequent this forum and work on their pagefile/virtual memory subsystems, so kudos to you on that. Everything you said was right on the button, dead accurate across the board.

Having the pagefile spread across multiple drives, say like putting a 1GB static (1GB min/max) pagefile on each drive regardless of what it's being used for would ensure the absolute optimal situation - Windows would always be near one of 'em for usage, definitely.

So far, I'd say you're probably getting the best bang for your buck as things are right now. :)
 
hehe thanks. yes its probably as good as it gets with this setup, i hope :)
 
Can anyone prove or show facts and bench's showing the speed increase of doing any of this?
 
MrGuvernment said:
Can anyone prove or show facts and bench's showing the speed increase of doing any of this?
Click to expand...

Last year we tried this with a CAD station ([email protected], 2gb, 7200 SATA drives)

SPECapc with Solidworks showed a 0.3% increase when putting the pagefile on it's own drive. Perhaps with games it would have a different result, but I suspect that the improvement is really pretty modest.
 
vurt said:
Now i have a pagefile on both c: and on e: because i've read (on microsoft site) that windows uses the pagefile that is optimal, so in this case (playing games) it would use pagefile on my non-raid drive. At least that is how i understand it works.
Click to expand...
Is this the article you mean?
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/99768/en-us

"If you have multiple hard disks, splitting up the paging file is a good idea, as it will speed up the access time. If you have two hard disks, and you split the paging file, both hard disks can be accessing information simultaneously, greatly increasing the throughput. However, if you have two hard disks, and one hard disk is faster than the other, it may be more effective to store the paging file on only the faster hard disk. Some experimentation may be necessary to arrive at the best configuration for your system."

I note that it was written for NT 3.1 (though "reviewed" recently), so I wonder if the advice still applies.

I've now found this newer article:
http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;197379

It reverses the earlier advice, at first:
"However, placing the pagefile on the boot partition does not optimize performance because Windows has to perform disk I/O on both the system directory and the pagefile. Therefore, it is recommended that you place the pagefile on a different partition and different physical hard disk drive so that Windows can handle multiple I/O requests more quickly."

Ultimately, however, it does come around to suggesting it be split, but not for the reason in the earlier article, but rather because Windows needs a pagefile on its boot drive in order to create a crash dump file.

In the end, it works out:
"The page file on the less frequently used partition will be used the majority of the time because it is not on a busy partition."
 
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