How would you partition 200gb's?

Right... It works like this - You install windows and the pagefile size is managed by windows. The pagefile is one large, contiguous block of data currently.

data-pagefile-data

Now you save some documents, some MP3's, and some movies, which are written to the availalbe space after the rest of the data already on the drive. Windows also creates temporary files from working and the internet

data-pagefile-data-temporaryfiles-documents-MP3s-movies

While doing that you are reconstructing a DIVX movie which you previously split into small pieces so that you could backup onto CD - The reconstruction fills all of your RAM and begins to hit the pagefile. While this occurs you delete your temporary internet files and other temporary working files windows was hanging onto. Windows needs to expand the pagefile to continue reconstructing the movie and part of the pagefile now inhabits the space that the temp files left available and the rest of the expansion gets tacked on after documents and MP3s you were saving, at the end of the drive. This is what you are left with:

data-pa-data-gef-documents-MP3s-movies-ile

Thats the basics... It actually gets fragmented much worse than that but that demonstrates the idea.

Setting min and max to equal will reserve that amount of space for the pagefile and it can remain contigous.

Ok, I thought that was how it worked. I wasn't sure if Windows would place a static pagefile around other files though.

I see what you meant now. If you are worried about that, and your defragmenter will not take care of it - you can try to set windows to no paging file, then restart and defragment, then create a static pagefile and restart. This will give you a completely contiguous pagefile AFAIK, but if you do not have enough RAM you may run into trouble doing this.

id take the seagate as a storage drive for movies and music and pictures.. because theyre not really to hard on components.. games would go on a faster hard drive.

I see what you meant now. If you are worried about that, and your defragmenter will not take care of it - you can try to set windows to no paging file, then restart and defragment, then create a static pagefile and restart. This will give you a completely contiguous pagefile AFAIK, but if you do not have enough RAM you may run into trouble doing this.

Click to expand...

Ah...ok. I'm not too worried about it - I keep my pagefile on a seperate drive and seperate partition like the quote Sonny posted says.