Page File/Virtual Memory and multiple HD's

This is my current page file setup, as you can see in Pagefile Usage Monitor
Basicaly its on 3 differant drives, 128mb on C=sata, 128mb on E=sate and 2048 on F=2Gig defraged Partishion of an internal pata storage drive.

My question is.... Is this current setup optimal?... Where page file usage is being spread across several drives (that are independant of one another) or would it be better to keep the page file on 1 drive (non system/gameing/programs drive) ???

Basicaly my idea is that if I spread the pagefile across several independant drives (each drive has its own ide or sata chanel/bus/port) Then the page file should be faster? because the workload is spread across 3 drives?

What do you guys think &/or do? with your page file setup? Thanks.

NM I found the answer here http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=308417 hope this helps someone

cozmo_d said:

NM I found the answer here http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=308417 hope this helps someone

Click to expand...

How did you end up configuring them?

I currently have a single page file on my storage drive.

Vulcan said:

How did you end up configuring them?

I currently have a single page file on my storage drive.

Click to expand...

Well according to that link.......
You can optimize virtual memory use by dividing the space between multiple drives and by removing space from slow or heavily accessed drives. To best optimize your virtual memory space, divide it among as many physical hard drives as possible. When you select drives, follow these guidelines:

• Try to avoid having a paging file on the same drive as the system files.
• Avoid putting a paging file on a fault-tolerant drive such as a mirrored volume or a RAID-5 volume. Paging files do not require fault-tolerance, and some fault-tolerant computers experience slow data writes because they write data to multiple locations.
• Do not put multiple paging files on different partitions on the same physical disk drive.

I have 4 Drives 2sata & 2pata

Sata0 has the OS and some storage
Sata1 has Apps/Games
Pata0 is a 20gig storage drive ata133
Pata1 is a 40gig storage drive also ata133

pata1 (fastest pata drive).....I have formatted the drive with a 2.2gig Partition which I have the bulk of the page file 2048mb's min/max set the other 38gigs are just file storage on that drive.

sata0 has a 16mb page file
sata1 has a 128mb page file
and pata0 a 128mb page file

I'm not sure if this is optimal but from what I read it seems logical I don't really know any benchmark programs to test this theory.

It seems to run fine though.

Another part of optimizing the page file system is too remove all page files from all drives (If you have enough ram) then reboot, then run a boot time defragmentation of all drives using disk keeper, then reassign the page files to your drives this way your page files are not defragmented, for that to be true though you must use custom size option & set min/max to the same value IE:128min, 128max.

From everything Ive read this should be the best possible way to run my page file system, but others might have more or different experiences & that's why I made this post to see how other folks are running it. and if anyone knows of a way to benchmark the page file setup.

I have my pagfile(4G) on a the first partition(4.5G) of a seperate HDD with an ATA 133 controller card. XP is installed on the primary IDE controller on the MB. I use the first partition of the third drive for the Photoshop scratch disk.

Primary IDE XP
ATA contoller card Pagefile
ATA controller card Photoshop scratch disk

This is a proven method when handling large files. The primary purpose for this computer is a Photoshop workstation. I'm not sure you would see much benefit unless you access the page file often. For gaming, I think you would benefit more by maxing out your ram.

well its not maxed out but I have 2gigs now & man its nice just got it the other day runin 1:1 instead of 5:4 @3.75ghz

plenty fast for my tinkerin but one day c2d maybe in 2 years LOL

mine is custom set to 0 min and 0 max

Xtreme Barton said:

mine is custom set to 0 min and 0 max

Click to expand...

Thats really not a good idea, from what I understand it causes problems.

^

none yet ... we'll see though

Vulcan said:

Thats really not a good idea, from what I understand it causes problems.

Click to expand...

For a year or so I have been running 0/0, and it works perfectly for gaming. Only photoshop complains. FEAR actually runs faster with no virtual memory. The ONLY time I have run out of virtual memory is when I was programming and I tried to allocate 100 gigabytes of RAM . The program crashed saying "out of memory" .

I did not try Vista, but on XP 2 gigs is more than enough for plenty of Firefox windows (40+), 2 x CSS games at once, Eve online, Windows search, WMP, Winamp, and still 400 MBs left over.

i have my page file on my raid 0 2nd partition, 1st partition has my system. and i have 2gigs with a 768meg pagefile

I have 2048mb on my WD 250 drive.

Well ive read alot about page file since this is something that can slow you down
no matter how fast your pc is the hard drives are the bottleneck imo, Ive run 1.5gigs or ddr2700 in the past with No page file but had some issues with paintshop

Im alwayes tempted to run with no page file & may test it again but for thoes of us who are working with our computers & gameing we sometimes need the page file sadly.

Since I got this 2gigs I started looking at the pagefile options again