Page files on 2 Hard Drives

  • Thread starter Thread starter CHRIS P
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CHRIS P

Greetings. I'm curious as to what an optimal size would
be for page files on two hard drives in my case. I'm
running 640MB RAM over an older/slower 30GB drive in
slave, AND a newer/faster 80GB drive in master. What
I've done thus far is to allocate [640MB(init.size)-1000MB
(max.size)] for the newer/faster80GBmaster hard drive (my
C:\), and used the 'System Managed Size' for the
older/slower30GBslave hard drive (my D:\). I'm wondering
if I've made a good choice here, especially in terms of
the D:\ drive. Should I give D:\ specific parameters and
if so, should they be the same as the C:\ drive
configuration? I plan to use both drives for music and
photos and some relative software. Thanks for your
attention. Sincerely,
--chris.
 
I would just put the pagefile on the faster drive and I prefer to make it
only one size probably 600Mb should be fine.

The secret is to put it on the other drive then defrag the faster one. Then
create the pagefile so it won't be fragmented. Since it is always in use
most defraggers cannot defrag a pagefile!

Also set the system to not do a dump in case of a crash it is usually waste
of time and you can always turn it back on!

Wayne
 
CHRIS P said:
Greetings. I'm curious as to what an optimal size would
be for page files on two hard drives in my case. I'm
running 640MB RAM over an older/slower 30GB drive in
slave, AND a newer/faster 80GB drive in master. What
I've done thus far is to allocate [640MB(init.size)-1000MB
(max.size)] for the newer/faster80GBmaster hard drive (my
C:\), and used the 'System Managed Size' for the
older/slower30GBslave hard drive (my D:\). I'm wondering
if I've made a good choice here, especially in terms of
the D:\ drive. Should I give D:\ specific parameters and
if so, should they be the same as the C:\ drive
configuration? I plan to use both drives for music and
photos and some relative software. Thanks for your
attention. Sincerely,
--chris.
Click to expand...

With multiple page files Windows will choose whichever one is going to
give the best overall performance for any particular paging operation.

So depending on what exactly you have on each drive in terms of
Windows files, application programs, and user data files and on what
specific activities are triggering the requirement to move out
information from RAM to the page file it may use either file.

One of the less well known facts about page files is that a
considerable portion, in fact sometimes a very large portion, of their
use is really phantom usage where no actual disk activity takes place
at all.

What happens is that application programs and Windows components tend
to ask for memory allocations that are larger, sometimes very much
larger, than what they actuall will use under normal circumstance.
The memory manager recognizes this and assigns RAM addresses to only
that portion of the request that is actually being used. The unused
portion is assigned to locations in the page file. Because this RAM
is unused there is nothing that needs to be written to the page file.
All that needs to happen is that the internal memory mapping tables
maintained by the CPU will show that the unused portions of the
requested memory is mapped to the page file.

Should it subsequently happen that some or all of the unused memory
request needs to be used then the memory manager will remap that part
to available locations in RAM.


One final point. The ultimate answer to all performance related
questions regarding the page file is that you should have sufficient
RAM so as to eliminate the need for Windows to ever move active memory
pages from RAM to the page file so as to allow that RAM to be used for
other, currently more important tasks. If there is no actual writing
to or reading from the page file then all questions about location,
relative hard drive speed, etc. become irrelevant.

Hope this is of some assistance.

Good luck


Ron Martell Duncan B.C. Canada
--
Microsoft MVP
On-Line Help Computer Service
http://onlinehelp.bc.ca

"The reason computer chips are so small is computers don't eat much."
 
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