Short stroking and pagefile drive

[lmartinefc]

Hi,

I have a 2.5" Seagate 7200rpm drive (1 month old) 500gb

I want to move my pagefile to this drive and set it up for short stroking and use for pagefile access

The system drive is an SSD but looking to move the pagefile off disk to the hard drive to speed everything up (will it ?) and reduce read/writes to the drive

What is the best guide available for this?

Also, some people say the inner most tracks are the fastest, others say the outermost. In logic, I would think that the outer tracks would be faster as there are more blocks passing under the head per disk revolution?

All help appreciated!

http://www.tomshardware.co.uk/forum/251815-14-where-operating-systems-page-file-games-separate-drives
http://www.tomshardware.co.uk/short-stroking-hdd,review-31527-2.html

 

[hang-the-9]

You will slow down your system if you do that, the pagefile on the SSD would be accessed much faster.

 

[MRFS]

Outermost tracks are fastest, because recording density is more or less
constant from outer to inner tracks: therefore, buffer-to-disk speed
is directly proportional to track circumference (Pi x Diameter):

http://www.supremelaw.org/systems/io.tests/platter.transfer.crossover.graphs.2.png


BEST WAY is to format a small primary partition on your 2.5" Seagate,
then use the Contig freeware to create a perfectly contiguous
pagefile.sys :

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

You'll also need to modify the attributes e.g.

attrib pagefile.sys +A +S +H
(easy to remember "ASH")

Then, tell your OS to move the paging to this new pagefile.sys .


Here are the complete directions we prepared for
our students and subscribers:


This sequence works best with 2 or more hard drives,
or at least 2 partitions on a single hard drive.


(1) make a new pagefile.sys that is defragmented upon creation,
by using CONTIG like this in Windows Command Prompt:

Usage: contig [-v] [-n filename length]

e.g.

contig -v -n D:\pagefile.sys 3072000000


(2) "length" can be obtained by right-clicking on "My Computer", then
Properties | Advanced | Performance Settings | Advanced | Virtual memory


(3) if the swap file is managed automatically by Windows, then
choose a "length" that is at least 1.5 X the total amount of physical RAM;
the example above assumes 2GB of RAM, hence length=3 Gigabytes


(4) change the attributes on pagefile.sys as follows
in Windows Command Prompt (aka DOS window):

attrib pagefile.sys +A +S +H


(5) move the swap file to your new, contiguous pagefile.sys
using the sequence at (2) above


(6) follow the directions provided by Windows for re-booting.


To confirm that pagefile.sys is now contiguous,
use the Windows defragmenter software and
examine the green area in the resulting graphic map
after analyzing the partition where pagefile.sys is now located.

Also, by moving pagefile.sys away from C: to a different drive letter,
the Windows XP defragmenter will be able to do a better job of
completely defragmenting all system files remaining on the
C: system partition.


MRFS

 

[lmartinefc]

Ok. One other point. I have a piece of database software. The files being used can be 10gb+. It quickly fills the RAM and spills over into the page file.

The software also uses its own TEMP directory (bit like its own page file) while analysing and indexing large databases.

1. Should I put this other TEMP directory onto a seperate Harddrive or will it still be faster to have the pagefile and TEMP directory on the SSD, with the data stored on a samsung spointpoint F3. Only conscious of this as the program, pagefile and TEMP will all be on the SSD then?

2. How can I make the page file as efficient as possible on the SSD?

3. With this type of analysis, how long is the SSD going to last (WD SiliconEdge 64Gb)

4. What is the maximum pagefile size with Windows & 32 bit vs Windows 7 64 bit?

(Ideally, maybe next month, ill purchase a second SSD and have the pagefile and temp file run off this)

 

[lmartinefc]

Also, will moving the pagefile off my SSD make it last longer?...

How much performance difference between having the pagefile on the SSD versus having a contiguous page file on the harddrive

Also taking into account the benefit of less read/write to SSD (or am I just feeding into the hype on this)

 

[gtvr]

a few quick thoughts:

1) moving the pagefile to the HD from the SSD is easy. You should be able to go to system settings, pick the new pagefile location/size, and set the old one to 0.

2) Since the effort is low, just do it and see how well it runs, you can always move it back.