Windows XP Page File Layout Question...

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stillaftermath

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Oct 12, 2006
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I wanted to get some feedback and other opinions on the "best" way to layout the page file for my system.

Currently, I have a WD 10K RPM Raptor 74GB drive as the system drive. The OS and all applications run from this drive. I also have a WD 7200 RPM Caviar SE 500GB (8MB cache) - this is a storage drive only, with all my movies, music, etc. Both are respectably quick drives, but obviously the Raptor is much faster.

Traditional wisdom is that your pagefile should be put on a seperate drive from your OS, however this may become more of a grey area since my system drive is considerably faster. Also, I'm constantly running bittorrent downloads to the 500GB, causing a lot of writes and reads from that drive.

What do you guys think? Am I best off with the pagefile on the faster, but system, drive? Best off with the seperate, but somewhat utilized and slower, drive? Or compromise and stripe the pagefile between the two?
 
I'd say make it a static size and leave it on the Raptor. I've never seen anyone produce tangible results when moving the pagefile to a second drive.
 
If you have a second drive, add another pagefile, say 1GB in size, and that way the OS can choose whichever one is more efficient at any given time, i.e. if the first drive is busy with a read/write operation, it would slow things down to have to read data, hit the pagefile, write data, hit the pagefile, etc. on that one drive. But if the first drive is active with application read/write operations, that leaves the second drive open for the OS to use for paging duties as required.

Moving the primary or single pagefile to a second drive isn't necessarily going to help with performance and can sometimes drastically decrease it - but adding a pagefile to every single hard drive you've got - about 1GB in size, static meaning 1GB min/1GB max - only helps to improve the overall efficiency of your machine.

Sure, these performance enhancements might not be noticeable in a single operation, but over the course of time your system is more efficient, period.

Hope this helps...
 
Is there any evidence to support that Windows XP actually choose which page file is better for a given time? I've seen that mentioned here and there, but never backed by any evidence.

All in all, "striping" is what I've been doing and will probably continue to do, I was just curious what others might do in my setup.
 
Well, if you're into striping, you could consider putting a pagefile across every hard drive you have as striping in an oddball tangential way of looking at it. :) It doesn't actually "stripe" the stuff going to the pagefile, obviously, but I have read some information at the TechNet site years ago that lends a lot of credibility to the fact that Windows does use pagefiles across multiple drives as required when the primary system drive pagefile (if one exists, as one always should) is busy or the drive itself is currently in use.

If I can locate that data I'll post it or the appropriate links.

All I know is that if I have two hard drives in a machine, and with ATA/IDE hardware the drives are on separate cables meaning separate controllers (IDE devices can't be accessed simultaneously on the same cable; only one at a time) then my system (whatever it happens to be at the time) runs a helluva lot more smoothly than just using the static pagefile on the system partition.
 
Well, I DID find an old article recommending segmenting (they used the word striping, also :p) ... but it was also for Windows NT 4.0. They described it as writing to the pagefiles in a round-robin sort of way, rather than a more intelligent this-one-is-busy-so-I'll-try-this-one approach.

I'd be really curious to see if the more modern OS's (XP and Vista) handle multiple page files in an "intelligent" way, factoring in the current I/O levels and read/write/seek speeds.
 
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