Is this paging file set up worth it?

smasher12

Distinguished
Jul 21, 2008
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18,510
Hi All,

Thank for taking the time to read this.
Basics on my system are;
Vista64
Quad Core
Nvidia 280
8gig 800 RAM

So am pretty sure I know the answer but I wanted to get some other views.

My C drive is a 36gig 10Krpm drive. I started to run out of room so I bought a 1TB 7200K rpm drive. A friend told me a while ago that if you set up an additional paging file on a different drive the OS would react quicker. I created a partition of 18gigs on the new TB drive and made it only for the paging file. I also hid the drive so I would not put anything else on the partition. I did it and I see no change.

So, my question is this; Am I not seeing a change because the paging file partition is at 7200K and not 10K? Or am I not seeing a change because of the other system specs?

Was it just a waste of time doing this and should I just delete that paging file partition?

Again, thanks for reading this
 
G

Guest

Guest
it is better to put paging file on other disk than windows O.S . let that disk FAT32 not NTFS
 

Zorg

Splendid
May 31, 2004
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25,790
Are you outrunning the 8G of RAM? The pagefile is technically only supposed to be used if you are running low on RAM. I did remove the pagefile on XP once but it appeared to ignore that and continued to use the pagefile. At any rate, unless you are using some seriously RAM heavy apps you won't see any difference.
 
With 8 gig of RAM, you likely won't need much of a paging file.
Windows does need a small paging file to work correctly, it writes log files to paging file in the event of a crash, or other problem. So you never want to turn it completely off, but you can set it down to like 10 meg and leave it there.
As Zorg said, with 8 gig of RAM onboard, you likely won't ever under any circumstances run short on memory, so nothing you do will ever even use a page file anyway.
 

ShadowFlash

Distinguished
Feb 28, 2009
166
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18,690
Agree with all of the above. What your friend told you is still true for lower RAM systems, but doubtful for yours. More importantly, 18GB's is wayyy too big for a swap file. If you set it too a fixed size that big, then you will likely even see some performance loss. I would probablly just set a fixed size on each drive of about 512MB - 1GB and call it a day.