Where to put Operating Systems, Page File & games on separate drives

client_9

Distinguished
Oct 10, 2008
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Hi,
My new gaming rig will dual boot XP and Windows 7 (on 2 separate drives)

Let's say XP will be on drive C
and Windows 7 will be on drive D

In the past, I've always put the OS and game programs on C drive and the page file on drive D

Is this the optimum arrangement? Or should the game program reside on a different drive than the OS? Or some other combination?

I'm looking forward to gaming in Windows 7 w/ a CrossFire set up.

Thanks.

Current Rig:
Processor: Core 2 Duo E8500 (3.16GHz) Wolfdale
Power Supply: Cooler Master Real Power 750W
Motherboard: Gigabyte GA-X48-DS4
Memory: 2x2GB Corsair Dominator PC2-8500 (TWIN2X4096-8500C5DF)
Hard Drive: Seagate Barracuda 7200.11 SATA
Video Card: Radeon HD 4850 512MB * will be running 2 in CrossFire w/ Windows 7 soon *
 

MRFS

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Dec 13, 2008
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Check out the CONTIG freeware utility:

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/bb897428.aspx


In order to effect "short strokes" of the read/write armature i.e. shortest possible,
BEST WAY is to format a primary partition on the lowest sector addresses,
then create "pagefile.sys" with this CONTIG software BEFORE writing
any other files to that partition. Ideally, then, "pagefile.sys" will occupy
the lowest sector addresses on a second HDD:

To keep things as simple as possible, we also disable the
Indexing Service on that partition immediately after formatting it
and before running CONTIG e.g.:

contig -v -n E:\pagefile.sys 2048000000

... creates a contiguous "pagefile.sys" on drive letter E: with size 2,048 megabytes.

Don't forget to change the attributes on "pagefile.sys" thus created
e.g. in Command Prompt (aka DOS window):

attrib pagefile.sys +A +S +H

(easy to remember: "ASH" with spaces before each + sign)

Then, move your swap file from its default location on your C: drive.


MRFS




 

tmike

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Jul 25, 2006
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Or create swap partitions as desired and use Windows' GUI interface to set swapfile size (min and max set to same value) and then defrag using an effective defragger (you can use a trial copy of PerfectDisk, for example).

If you are a language lawyer, this is not actually short-stroking. The goal of short-stroking is the placement of constantly-accessed items such as directories and file allocation information in close proximity; historically this was near the spindle's center cylinder. (This is why some filesystems place certain disk structures in the middle of a partition). What is being described here is the placement of constantly-accessed items on the fastest cylinders of the spindle, which can be much faster than the slowest cylinders and makes a much bigger difference on fast media than "real" short-stroking does. Unfortunately, the term short-stroking has come to refer to both, particularly in PC-only environments.