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Where to put Page file?

S

Standpoint

[H]ard|Gawd
Joined
Mar 23, 2005
Messages
1,366
I have been reading about changing my pagefile to a drive that does not contain your operating system or gaming applications. I currently have two hard drives I use for these-one for the OS, and one for games/apps. I always thought that it would be best this way because the games would not run on the same hard drive as the OS, however Im wondering if maybe I should change my tune and put the games and OS on the same drive, and put my pagefile and files for storage on the other. Which method does anyone think is better? Thanks.
 
Page file optimizations are, IMO, overrated. If your system is using the page file to store any data that you the user are actually working with, then you need to add more physical memory. Regardless of how well optimized your page file is, access to it will still be measured in miliseconds compared to nanoseconds for physical RAM, a factor of 1,000 difference. 1GB of RAM can be had for less than $100 now, there's no reason not to have 1GB of physical RAM in a gaming system.

That said, it is generally acknowledged that the best performance of a page file is on a separate physical disk from the operating system so that page file access does not interfere with I/O generated by the OS, and in a separate partition to minimize fragmentation of it. However, the gain from such optimizations is fairly small, and simply using physical memory will always be faster.

To answer the other part of your question, if may be best to put your games on your OS Drive, particularly if the OS drive is significantly faster than your data drive, like a 73GB Raptor versus a Samsung data drive. If you have Windows XP well tuned, it shouldn't generate much disk access after bootup and logon, leaving most of your disk resources for loading your programs and data.
 
Thanks. I think Im going to try putting the OS/Games on the same drive. I think both my drives are the same speed, but one is an 80GB Western Digital, the other an old 10GB Toshiba.
 
I'd have to agree with DougLIte, a gig of RAM under XP will do more then any pagefile tricks you can try. Back in the day it made a difference, not so much now. Windows actually does what it's supposed to do...most of the time.

I do move my IE cache to a different drive though, that really helps prevent fragmentation on my main drive.
 
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