Seperate Hard Drive for Windows Page File

[NightshadowUK]

Just stumbled across the idea of running the Windows Page File on a separate empty Hard Drive. I have a few spare (6/8/10GB) drives and was wondering if anyone had any experience with doing this and if it'd be worth it?

[Moby-Dick]

you would possilby get a slight performance boost due to the fact that the system can use a dedicated set of read write heads for the paging file.

how much of a boost is a different matter.

[specofdust]

The fact that the spares are probably old and slow would most likely kill the benefit.

[NightshadowUK]

I did wonder, the 10GB is an old 5400RPM Maxtor.

[specofdust]

Yeah, its not worth it. If I were you, I'd try an' JBOD 'em, and then install a linux distro 'on em, might be a good experience.

[5lab]

i used to have the swap file running off my 'media' drive (back in teh day), but tbh, i think tis better just to get some more ram in there..

[ultim8um]

In theory a small solid state drive connected via SATA would give you the best performance... Cost would be prohibitive mind you! As for using an old drive, forget it as the drive would be slow compared to any more recent SATA drive...

[Destroyer^]

i know not the best reply but cld some1 explain what you guys are talking about? :S im intrigued

[StormPC]

It wouldn't be worth putting in the system.

Just get 4 150GB Raptors in RAID 0 and you will be set!

[ultim8um]

Sod that just go SCSI and RAID 0 a couple of small 15k drives

[kempez]

I use my RAID 0 drive for my paging file and I noticed a definate performance increase (main OS drive is still IDE as I'm too lazy to do a re-install )

[Funkstar]

i know not the best reply but cld some1 explain what you guys are talking about? :S im intrigued

Windows (and just about every other modern mainstream OS) doesn't just use RAM for its memory, it also used a portion of hard drive as virtual memory. XP calls this a page file (Win9x called it a swap file).

In simple terms, when you open a new app, change to another app or load files into memory the OS moves other files out of real RAM and into the swap/page file so the current task has more room in the fast real memory.

If your page file is on another drive on another IDE/SATA connection then you can see a speed up because the drive heads do not have to whizz back and forth across the drive. switching from loading data to writing page file.

With regards to the original question, if you move your page file to a seperate drive, but the drive in question is old (like the ones sugested) and performance increase from the additional read/write heads is offset by the fact the drive is a lot slower.

Hope this make sense.

(this is a personal thing, but you don't have a size limit to your posts, so you don't need to write in "test speak" on here )

edit: oh yeah, just to add, the desription above has been simplified a lot, but i think it is enough. Sorry if anyone has a problem with it