Single drive partitioning & swap file

[_Tank]

Many store bought machines, and laptops will come pre-configured with 2-3 partitions on the hard drive; one for windows, another for storage/data, and the third for restoration.

I can only determine that it might be intended to prevent the main partition from becoming fragmented... But more often than not windows has eaten up 99% of the primary, so I end up deleting the secondary partition (which had never been used), and extending the primary to all but 2 or 3gb of it (which i then set as a swap/page file partition).

Has anyone had good or bad experiences with having a single large primary partition with a swap partition (larger allocation units) vs the primary/data partitions? I'm curious to what the better method is.

 

[YeOldeStonecat]

Moving the pagefile to another partition will give you a performance boost if that other partition is a whole different hard drive...another spindle. There's really no gain if that partition is on the same physical disk....same spindle.

 

[Bahamut]

If you're filling your system partition (the one with Windows on it, and whatever else) to 99% (I'm guessing you're being facetious with that estimate) then you're doing it wrong. Filling any hard drive partition to more than 85% full is going to cause problems, and whether you see the effects of them immediately or not, it is a problem. Doing so basically causes the OS to "choke" whenever it needs to write new data or temp files to that drive (unless you're using something like a RAMdisk for such purposes) because there's no workable free space to write data to, even if it's a 1TB drive with ~15% space left according to Explorer.

If you used basically the last 2-3GB of space on that drive as measured by the total capacity of it - since the restore partition is almost always placed after the system/Windows partition - and put a page file on that 2-3GB of space you basically shot yourself in the foot, as the saying goes. You placed the page file at the virtual end of the physical hard drive which is the slowest possible place it can be and robbed yourself of performance probably to a significant degree.

If you're going to do one single system partition, the best suggestion with respect to the page file is leave it alone, seriously. Windows can handle it pretty damned well from that point and it'll get placed toward the front/beginning of the drive where performance is best.

If you're using Windows 7, Windows 7 cleanly installed will have two partitions: the small 100MB partition with boot and recovery files on it and then the system partition itself, however large you choose it to be.

Also, there is ZERO POINT to changing the allocation size aka cluster or sector size of the page file partition if you choose to be silly and create one. Page file data is in 4KB chunks, hence "pages" of memory that get written to the page file. Changing the allocation size to something like 16, 32, or heaven forbid even 64KB clusters or sectors is just plain old idiotic with a side order of stupid thrown in for good measure.

Seriously, the only thing you can do to improve system performance with respect to the page file is what was suggested above: put the page file on another physical hard drive, and to be honest, even better is place a page file on every physical drive if you have more than one. That allows Windows to multitask even more efficiently overall.

The page file != virtual memory; the page file is one aspect of the virtual memory subsystem overall, but some folks just never seem to get that right.

Figure out what partition size(s) you want, install Windows, leave the page file defaults alone, add a page file to each physical hard drive if you have more than one, get more RAM, etc. and leave it alone. Those are the true performance boosters.