Is This a Good Idea?

On occasion when I have built new systems I have made a small partition for the swap file. I had read that having a separate partition helped to keep your drive from getting fragmented. Well, I took it a step further and made that drive FAT, figuring since the drive would be largely empty that it would have quicker access. Now, on the face of it. it sounds logical, but this isn't about logic it's about computers. So, in the real world does this work or just make other problems?

Not sure I can answer that question but my swap file is on my storage drive (MP3's and back-ups) in it's own partition. Seems to help a little. But when I put in my 2nd gig of ram I do not think it will matter. My main drive, with the OS, is 2X36 Raptors in Raid0 . The swap is NTFS

I'm not 110% on this but here i go,

I beleive it depends on how the partition table is set up. if you have the swap set right after the boot records that's gonna speed it up a little be'in closer into the drive, as far as the formatting, as fast as computers are today i dont think why type of formatting you use will make any "considerable" difference as FAT/(32)/NTFS really read easy and very quickly my any recent hardware.

just my .02

it might make slight percentages difference, but then again the newer filesystems usually allocate that data in a better managed form.

repilce said:

I'm not 110% on this but here i go,

I beleive it depends on how the partition table is set up. if you have the swap set right after the boot records that's gonna speed it up a little be'in closer into the drive

Click to expand...

Do you have any idea how I would do this? I didn't know you could control where the swap file is on the drive. If the drive is otherwise empty would it end up in the correct place?

I remember an article about this somewhere a while ago, if I remember right you should put the swap file on the same partition as your Windows dir because your HD is accessing that partition anyway. Other tips ware to use a defrag program (not the windows one) with the option to set the swap file to the outer part of the HD.
Take this with a grain of salt because it was a long time ago but it was either on Rojaks pot or Anandtech so just do a search there.

I remember reading that same thing, Flip-Mode, but a ran against everything that I had previously learned. Sometimes you don't know what to believe.
Thank you all for your feedback. I guess I need to do some further experiments.