Paging file question

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TopACe82

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Not sure if this is right forum to ask this question but here goes.

Been wondering about paging files.
I have 3 hard disks and only system one has paging file currently.
But what if i enable paging file on different disk, does that disk data use that disk paging file or does it use system disk paging file?
 
In some cases having your pagefile on a separate disk can be helpful. For instance, if the second disk is on its own controller, there may be some performance increase. Disk paging will never be as fast as ram, so get more ram if your system is doing a significant amount of paging to disk. You can allocate multiple pagefile spaces. If you're on Windows 2000/XP/2003 it will automatically pick the most optimal space.

This can probably be moved to the Memory forum.
 
I have all my disk on sata ports on mobo, so they use same controller i think.

So basically there would be no use to use disk specific paging file?
Gonna use system disk one instead i think.
 
Unless you are doing a significant amount of paging, you won't notice any performance gain. Though adding a second page file on a separate drive doesn't hurt; in fact windows would probably favor it over the primary. You should always keep a pagefile on your system drive. Also create your pagefile after a clean install or defrag all at once. This way it's one contiguous block of disk. Incrementally increasing the pagefile can result in a fragmented pagefile. Not the end of the world, but required another tool to defrag.
 
Thanks for the tips.

Another thing i am wondering is that.
I have the 3 disk assigned as C,D and F drive. And i have 2 gig paging file on C and F drive.
So, if i use program that resides on F drive. Will it use F drives paging file or system disks one?
 
TopACe82 said:
Thanks for the tips.

Another thing i am wondering is that.
I have the 3 disk assigned as C,D and F drive. And i have 2 gig paging file on C and F drive.
So, if i use program that resides on F drive. Will it use F drives paging file or system disks one?
Click to expand...

its up to windows to decide
 
Put a 1GB static (1GB min, 1GB max) on each physical drive. That's the only thing you're going to do that may offer increased performance to some degree that you probably won't even notice.

Other than that, leave it alone. If you don't want the slightly increased benefit to system performance because of improved multitasking capability - the system will be able to read from any given pagefile and write to another at the same time if you put one on each physical drive - then leave it alone and let Windows manage the single pagefile on the system partition without touching the settings at all.
 
General rule in computing....any change less 20% the avg person will not even notice
 
The benefit of having multiple static pagefiles spread across multiple physical hard drives is primarily the increased performance because of the machine being able to multitask far easier. If you have one hard drive in your system, it doesn't matter what kind of drive it is: you are crippled by the fact that hard drives cannot read and write at the same time. Now, consider that two hard drives working together can read/write from one of them and read/write from the other at the same time - this effectively translates into twice the performance right there.

One way to prove this for yourself if you have multiple hard drives (not just partitions, this only works with separate physical hard drives) is this:

Take a big file, perhaps a compressed archive of several gigabytes (maybe rip a DVD to your hard drive) and then archive all the files into one big RAR or Zip file. Now, the fun part. Once that's done, look at a clock or a watch, or even a cell phone maybe as many of them offer stopwatch functionality somewhere in the extra features (my old Nokia does).

Extract the archive onto the same drive that you just created it on and time the extraction as closely as you can from start to finish. Once that's done, and assuming you DO have another physical hard drive that you can store data on, get the watch/stopwatch ready and extract the contents to the second hard drive.

You should notice it goes a helluvalot faster - unless, of course, you have two IDE hard drives and they're both attached to the same cable. The crippling aspect of IDE controllers is drives on the same cable (meaning the same channel) are still limited to read or write, even if you have two drives. A single IDE channel (one cable) has two devices (the old Master and Slave concept) and can't read from one of them and write to the other at the same time. You have to have two physical drives on separate IDE cables which means independent channels, and then you'll have read/write on one and read/write on the other at the same time once again.

SATA drives don't suffer from this crippling performance aspect because each cable is an individual channel.

I just did that experiment on my machine which at the moment has a 250GB Maxtor 7200 RPM SATA I 16MB drive as my "primary" drive (35GB system partition for XP Pro x64, the rest is storage space), and a secondary drive that's an old Western Digital 80GG 7200 RPM IDE 8MB drive on the IDE channel as Master (shared with my Plextor 760A as Slave). I popped in Iron Man, actually (KICK ASS MOVIE). The full content on the DVD was about 7.9GB roughly, ripped to the hard drive then compressed with the "Store" preset in WinRAR 3.80 - took about 4 mins to store it ("Store" doesn't use compression, it's like TAR in that it just creates an archive of the content in a single file).

I then did the decompression right back into the same directory in a sub-folder (Q6600 at 3 GHz with 8GB of DDR2 800 here and the hard drives just mentioned). To de-archive the files right back onto the same drive took about 3 mins and 14 seconds. To de-archive the files into a directory on the secondary 80GB drive it took about 1 minute and 43 seconds roughly... big difference.

So, if you have multiple hard drives, and you put a small(ish) pagefile of about 1GB on each of them, whenever Windows needs to page data in or page it out, even if the primary system drive is busy, it'll know it has more pagefiles available on another drive and, wham, multitasking improves.

Think of this as "dual cables" like "dual core" CPUs works. Two is better than one, and four is better than two (much to the chagrin of all the dual core afficianados that simply don't get just how awesome a machine with quad cores really is in terms of smoothness and efficiency).

Simple.
 
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