Bill said:
If you are going to put the pagefile in its own partiton, can you
create an extended partition with just one volume in it and put
pagefile in that volume? Or, does it have to be a primary partition?
You can put it on either kind of partition, but this is *not* a good idea,
and can hurt your performance. What it does is move the page file to a
location on the hard drive distant from the other frequently-used data on
the drive. The result is that every time Windows needs to use the page file,
the time to get to it and back from it is increased.
Putting the swap file on a second *physical* drive is a good idea, since it
decreases head movement, but not to a second partition on a single drive. A
good rule of thumb is that the page file should be on the most-used
partition of the least-used physical drive. For almost everyone with a
single drive, that's C:.
If you have enough RAM, the penalty for doing doing this may be slight,
since you won't use the page file much, but it won't help you.
Also, the other problem with a separate partition like this is that you run
the risk of making it too small, in which case programs will fail for lack
of virtual memory, or too large, which is wasteful of disk space. If you
leave it on C:, it can expand or contract as needed.
