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question about, swapfile win xp

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amdextreme

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Jun 9, 2005
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FLORIDA
hello all, well i read that setting your swap file on another hard drive is better for performance, here is my question, i keep a backup drive which runs at 5400 rpm, and my main runs at 7200 rpm, would putting the swapfile on the backup drive actually hurt the performance being it only spins at 5400???? thanks... :shrug:
 
I would say that having them on seperate drives would be best regardless.

If you are doing paging heavy operations, your HDD will be thrashing about doing normal file accesses as well as trying to page stuff like crazy. If one drive can focus on accessing data that isn't currently in RAM, and the other drive can focus on Paging data, it would be a much more efficient approach to data access.

The downside is that the pageing file drive will have slower seek times due to the lower rotational speed. I would consider accepting these slower seek times to be superior to accepting the increased seeks which would be required if only one drive were utilized for all data access and paging operations.

The good news though, is that if you have enough RAM paging is not a major issue. I have about 1.25GB of RAM in my main computer, and I only page occasionally when operating on USENET and doing other things at the same time. Under normal usage (office suites and multimedia) paging should be minimal if you have 512MB of RAM or more. Under gaming conditions, if you are paging at all you are screwed IMO, regardless of which drive the pagefile resides on.
 
thanks for the quick reply, actually i am running 1 gig, of ram, i may still try to place the swap file on the other hard drive to see if it makes much of a difference, thanks..... :)
 
I would recommend trying it and seeing if you notice a difference. I wouldn't expect that you would, however I do think it theoretically better to place them on seperate drives even with a slower secondary drive. I'm not familiar with any objective testing which has been done to observe this though.
 
You need not move the page file at all.Just add a static page file on the first partition of the second drive.Leave the page file on c/ and let windows chose what is best (or whatever it says) so it can chose which one is faster at the time.
Setting static on C/ may cause windows to chose on startup and only see one page file for each restart of windows.MS implies that it can chose the fastest access on the fly but I have found no article that specifically states that as a fact.
My copy of PhotoDeluxe 2.0 will only run if a second page file on another drive is created as this makes it compatable with older pre 2000 operating systems.
 
shadowdr said:
MS implies that it can chose the fastest access on the fly but I have found no article that specifically states that as a fact.
How to configure paging files for optimization and recovery in Windows XP
http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;314482

Quoted from the above article...
The optimal solution is to create one paging file that is stored on the boot partition, and then create one paging file on another partition that is less frequently accessed on a different physical hard disk if a different physical hard disk is available. Additionally, it is optimal to create the second paging file so that it exists on its own partition, with no data or operating-system-specific files. By design, Windows uses the paging file on the less frequently accessed partition over the paging file on the more heavily accessed boot partition. An internal algorithm is used to determine which paging file to use for virtual memory management.
 
Thanks redduc900,it was the highlighted text I was referring to when I said it was implied, but I felt was ambiguous as to if it is done more then once.I think that it may have been republished for XP and deleted from the 2000 knowledge base.I did find another article which adds validity to the fact that the algorithm may be run more often as I believe XP is a fluid extension of previous operating systems.located here the last line states;
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.
 
MS's articles on VM and PF's are somewhat misleading and contradictory to say the least, since the articles were originally written for NT/W2K, and transposed/republished for XP like you mentioned. Here's another good article, which like the others was originally published for NT/W2K I believe...

RAM, Virtual Memory, Pagefile and all that stuff
http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;555223
 
thanks for the feedback, although i am still a little leary about putting it on my 5400 compared to having on a 7200 rpm disk,,,i am assuming this may affect the speed of accessing the pagefile,,,plus right now i am having other problems, i just built a new PC and am getting random errors here and there, really frustrating.......... :bang head I am running win xp pro, with msi k7n2 delta 2 mobo, athlon xp 2700+ T-bred core cpu,in which temps. are at 54 to 57C which isnt that bad to cause problems... 1 gig, corsair 3200+ memory, synched to run at the cpu fsb, ge-force 5500 vid card and creative soundcard, not sure what it could be, ive been in the bios, adj. every setting i could think of, set to optimal standard,,is a little better, but i want to be able to overclock, and it seems that a 3% increase in overclocking is causing me problems, should be able to handle that,,,any suggestions would be great, thanks all for the advice....... :shrug:
 
remember to put the second hd drive on the second ide channel. So it should be like this, IDE 1 is Main drive (either solo or with another optical drive) IDE 2 should be Hard drive 2 plus optical drive.

This way 2 hd's dont bog down one ide channel.
 
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