I need advice regarding my pagefile

[White_Wolf]

Tomorrow I am ordering a 250 gig hard drive with a spindle rotation of 7200 RPM's. I currently have a 30 gig hard drive that runs at 4500 RPM's.

When I get this drive I am going to put it in my computer as my Master drive and run my OS off of it because my OS running on a 7200 RPM drive would run faster than on a 4500 RPM drive. But I was wondering if I should put my system (WinXP) page file on C drive, or whether I should put it on my old drive that will now be used as a slave drive. Even though my old drive is much slower, would it improve my system's performance since it can now read and write to C drive while reading and writing the page file on a separate drive.

Also, my drives are an EIDE/ATA-100.

Would it benefit me to partition my old 30GB HD to have just one 1GB logical drive, so that the pagefile is sure to be written on the outer rim of the HD's platter?

Should I format that old HD in FAT16, FAT32, or NTFS? Will one allow the pagefile to be read faster? (I lack the understanding of clusters and sectors and stuff like that).

Also, I have 256MB of SDRAM PC100, what value/size should I set my pagefile too?

 

[eyeCpc]

Windows will automatically place it on the current C drive unless you custom select the old drive. For a gaming build many simply disable the creation of it especially when running more then 1gb of memory for the performance increase there. A paging file is generally set to twice the amount of physical memory installed or you simply set the let Windows manage option, Being that the new drive is a faster model seeing the paging file on the old slower drive would be stepping backward there.

 

[KSoD]

Always use NTFS. Any other file system would be wasted. FAT16 and FAT32 are Windows 95 technology and useless now. They are also very prone to easy attacks.

Leave the pagefile on your new drive. As stated putting it on the old drive will slow you down.

As for the pagefile leave it as Windows sets it. With only 256MB RAM you will need it.

 

[EricB]

yo get the fastest performance put it in it's own partition at the first part of your second hdd. hdd speed doens't make much of a difference

 

[White_Wolf]

Well thank you everyone for the advice.
After having spent a few hours studying this subject, I think the best thing for me to do is just leave the page file at it's default "1.5 x RAM size" and keep it on the new faster drive.

A couple of things I gathered from my study is never turn off the pagefile, even if you have a ton of RAM, because many programs allocate a huge amount of ram/pagefile for themselves (much more than is needed in most cases). I also learned that it is not good to put the pagefile on a separate partition, because then the HDD head has to swing farther. And thus placing the page file on a separate physical HDD with nothing else on it, will give you the best results.

So I am going to put my pagefile on my new drive, and then I am going to experiment by placing it on it's own physical drive (my old HDD) and compare the performance.

I'll update this thread and let you guys know which method seems to give me the best performance.

*paces while impatiently waiting for new hard drive to arrive*

 

[EricB]

Well thank you everyone for the advice.
After having spent a few hours studying this subject, I think the best thing for me to do is just leave the page file at it's default "1.5 x RAM size" and keep it on the new faster drive.

A couple of things I gathered from my study is never turn off the pagefile, even if you have a ton of RAM, because many programs allocate a huge amount of ram/pagefile for themselves (much more than is needed in most cases). I also learned that it is not good to put the pagefile on a separate partition, because then the HDD head has to swing farther. And thus placing the page file on a separate physical HDD with nothing else on it, will give you the best results.

So I am going to put my pagefile on my new drive, and then I am going to experiment by placing it on it's own physical drive (my old HDD) and compare the performance.

I'll update this thread and let you guys know which method seems to give me the best performance.

*paces while impatiently waiting for new hard drive to arrive*

there are a lot of myths about pagefiles. you just posted some.

A pagefile need to be at the front of the disc for the quickest access. the drive speed has little relevance to the matter. it need to be off of the drive that's doing a million things at once (which is the OS drive). it's impossible to put the pagefile in a partition front of old windows on the first hdd although you can do linux and vista like that. when windows access the pagefile, it is not encoding video, it is just accessing it. so the drive can be 5400, 7200 or 10,000rpm with no increase in the speed of pagefile performance.

so, putting in it's own partition at the first part of the second hdd will give you the best performance. the actual size is of little relevance. some people say to set it to 1.5X of your ram, some say 2x while others tell you to set it so that the ram and the pagefile equal 2000mb. that was an an old rule of thumb, when most people were using 256-512mb of ram. just set the minimum and maximum to the same thing. Mine is set to 4096 mb and I have 2 gigs of ram

now I just gave you the real deal. you can ignore it and keep following those myths, if you want. I twice posted in depth articles on this subject on this forum a couple of years ago

 

[White_Wolf]

there are a lot of myths about pagefiles. you just posted some.

A pagefile need to be at the front of the disc for the quickest access. the drive speed has little relevance to the matter. it need to be off of the drive that's doing a million things at once (which is the OS drive). it's impossible to put the pagefile in a partition front of old windows on the first hdd although you can do linux and vista like that. when windows access the pagefile, it is not encoding video, it is just accessing it. so the drive can be 5400, 7200 or 10,000rpm with no increase in the speed of pagefile performance.

so, putting in it's own partition at the first part of the second hdd will give you the best performance. the actual size is of little relevance. some people say to set it to 1.5X of your ram, some say 2x while others tell you to set it so that the ram and the pagefile equal 2000mb. that was an an old rule of thumb, when most people were using 256-512mb of ram. just set the minimum and maximum to the same thing. Mine is set to 4096 mb and I have 2 gigs of ram

now I just gave you the real deal. you can ignore it and keep following those myths, if you want. I twice posted in depth articles on this subject on this forum a couple of years ago

Can you provide any links to those posts? I want to learn as much about this subject as possible.

 

[TheMajor]

I would put it on the second hard disk for sure. Getting data from the virtual memory (RAM or page file) is mostly random access. You don't want a single drive to perform 2 random access tasks at once (loading the program to the page file on the same disk).
The startup times for programs which do not reside in the virtual memory will be faster.
Programs that are still in memory may start up a little faster when using the 7200. It really depends on how you use your computer.

If you are using the computer for work and the only program you are using is Adobe Premiere, and you constantly keep closing and opening it, you may want to put the page file on the 7200.

Either way, use a large page file. Something like 2500MB (if you have enough space).

EDIT: Regardless of how hard you try to defrag your hard disk, with only 256MB of RAM, loading anything will always result in random access because it has to move data to a different location on the same hard disk. Even if it is already in the memory, it still has to check if it is there.

 

[EricB]

we can't find old posts since the forum has been upgrade. I found this old forum post by me through google

http://www.techist.com/showthread.php?s=&threadid=56137

this how you set the page file

To accurately determine the optimal pagefile size you should see how much memory your most memory- intensive programs use and then set the pagefile to comfortably accommodate this. A rough and ready way of doing this is to configure your Task Manager as specified under the Task Manager section, then nm what you believe is your most memory-intensive application or game and use it for a period of time. Then without quitting the game or application, bring up the Task Manager and check the peak memory usage figure for the largest process under the Processes tab -this should indicate how much memory the program usually needs. Also after a period of time using various applications and games on your system, open up Task Manager and go to the Performance tab, then check the Peak figure under the 'Commit Charge (K)' section -this is approximately the maximum amount of memory in KB required so far by your system. These will give you an indication of how much total memory you need when going through the next step.
I understand that for most people accurately working out which is the most memory intensive application or game, and more importantly predicting the amount of memory future software will require is tedious if not impossible. Therefore follow my general recommendation below to set a fixed pagefile that should be sufficient for all your needs. Since the total memory available to Windows XP is a combination of your Virtual Memory plus your 'Real Memory' (System RAM), you should ensure that the suirr of these two is sufficiently large to prevent Windows from nmning out of memory. In general, I suggest a minimum of 2GB (2048MB) for your Virtual Memory +RAM:

Example: If you have 256MB of RAM set the Initial and Maximum pagefile sizes to 1792MB each.

Example: If you have 512MB of RAM, set the Initial and Maximum pagefile sizes to 1536MB each.

Example: If you have 1024MB (1GB) of RAM, set the Initial and Maximum pagefile sizes to 1024MB each.

Exam)~le:If you have 2GB of RAM or more, set the Initial and Maximum pagefile sizes to 200MB each.

Once you've adjusted your Virtual Memoly size settings click the Set button and reboot if required. Your pagefile will now be in a single fixed unfragmented file, created closer to the start of the hard drive for faster performance (See Position of the Pagefile below). There will be plenty of headroom for memory-intensive applications and games and you should notice smoother performance.
Note that the common myth about the pagefile being '1.5 x RAM' or some other multiple is quite clearly counterintuitive. Consider the situation where you only have 128MB of RAM: setting the maximum pagefile size to 1.5 x 128MB = 192MB + 128MB = 320MB of total available memory for Windows XP which is obviously not going to give you enough memory for modem games and applications. Remember, it is about how much total memory (RAM+ Pagefile) that should be made available for Windows to operate efficiently.
If at the end of all this you still have doubts about what to do, or you nln into any problems, you can either increase the fixed pagefile size further (which never hurts), set a 'semi-permanent' pagefile which has an Initial size equal to your current RAM, and a Maximum size which is very high, e.g. 3000MB, or failing that simply choose the 'System Managed Size' setting to revert to the Windows default pagefile size. Whatever you do, don't set a zero pagefile.

 

[TheMajor]

I have my page file at 0. Many of my programs still start up quite quickly after about half a day of using my computer, which means not much of my 2GB RAM got flushed in the mean time.