Swap file usage

  • Thread starter Thread starter HC
  • Start date Start date
H

HC

Dunno if this is *quite* the right newsgroup, but this seems like something
people here would know.

I'm going to add a new hard drive to my system. It will be a 7200RPM PATA
133 drive with an 8MB buffer. My current drive is a 7200RPM PATA 100 drive
with a 2MB buffer. Would it be better to put my swap file on the old drive
all by itself, or put it on the new fast drive along with Windows 2000?

Thanks
HC
 
That is what I would do. I like to use a second drive for doing internal
system backups, and keeping archived files.

In all our computers we are using second hard disks. We have the swap file
working on them. We found that this gives a bit of a speed increase.

--

Jerry G.
======


Dunno if this is *quite* the right newsgroup, but this seems like something
people here would know.

I'm going to add a new hard drive to my system. It will be a 7200RPM PATA
133 drive with an 8MB buffer. My current drive is a 7200RPM PATA 100 drive
with a 2MB buffer. Would it be better to put my swap file on the old drive
all by itself, or put it on the new fast drive along with Windows 2000?

Thanks
HC
 
Dunno if this is *quite* the right newsgroup, but this seems like something
people here would know.

I'm going to add a new hard drive to my system. It will be a 7200RPM PATA
133 drive with an 8MB buffer. My current drive is a 7200RPM PATA 100 drive
with a 2MB buffer. Would it be better to put my swap file on the old drive
all by itself, or put it on the new fast drive along with Windows 2000?

Thanks
HC
Click to expand...

It depends on what you'd be doing when exceeding physical
memory. Windows does I/O to pagefile otherwise but that's
not nearly so significant. Hopefully your system has enough
memory that it's never dependent on the HDD for virtual
memory needs.

Just running the OS, it's far harder to need swap space on a
modern system due to vastly better equipped systems. Most
any PC has 256MB these days and yet WinXP itself doesn't
need over 160MB. Applictions on the other hand may make up
a larger portion of memory used (in some cases) such that IF
you had this kind of typical need, you'd be better off
putting swapfile on some other drive than that used by the
application and/or it's data files. Bascially the goal is
to look at which is making the most demands from your HDD(s)
and putting the swap file on the least-used drive (assuming
all are moderately new, fast drives- Yours is modern enough
to qualify if less than a couple years old, give or take (
excluding early 7K2 drives, a ~4 year old 20GB 7K2 drive is
quite a bit slower than a new 120GB 7K2 drive, regardless of
the cache sizes.)
 
HC said:
I'm going to add a new hard drive to my system. It will be a 7200RPM PATA
133 drive with an 8MB buffer. My current drive is a 7200RPM PATA 100 drive
with a 2MB buffer. Would it be better to put my swap file on the old drive
all by itself, or put it on the new fast drive along with Windows 2000?
Click to expand...

My intuition says it probably doesn't make a noticeable difference. Our
single-user systems operate fairly much in a read-a-page, write-a-page
mode and wait for the I/O operation to complete after each one. If you
select a different drive there is a very small probability that it will
be in exactly the right place to start the next transfer where as the
first drive will have to wait for a bit until the disk turns to the
right place. Most of the time, the second disk will have to wait in
the same way however.

I believe the right thing to do is buy lots of RAM so that the swap file
doesn't get used at all. Set its size to 0.
 
Create a small partition at the beginning of the old hard drive for the page file. Don't set the pagefile size to 0; it will most likely cause a system crash. Your temp directory should also be on the old drive.
 
Create a small partition at the beginning of the old hard drive for the page file. Don't set the pagefile size to 0; it will most likely cause a system crash. Your temp directory should also be on the old drive.
Click to expand...
Wondering; would it matter if the drives were on the same IDE channel
or not, as to whether it's faster to be on the second drive?
 
Wondering; would it matter if the drives were on the same IDE channel
or not, as to whether it's faster to be on the second drive?
Click to expand...

Using separate cables won't make any difference. Worst case scenario with both on the same cable is they will both run with UDMA mode 5.
 
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