1 larger page file or many smaller ones?

Combat squirrel · 21 May 2006 at 12:54

As title, I have 5 physical harddrives in my pc + my system 1, do I set the page file to 1 ~512mb on another harddisk (running 2gb ram xp MCE) OR 5x100mb pagefiles across the 5 disks on my pc, in theory if windows used it properly i guess 5x100 but is windows still stupid ?

Participant · 21 May 2006 at 12:59

I believe that the fastest way is to have a single page file on its own partition and on a seperate physical hard drive to that of the system files / games. I can't see the benefit of having many small page files tbh, though I could easily be wrong!

Combat squirrel · 21 May 2006 at 17:50

n e more comments ?

Zefan · 21 May 2006 at 17:55

Stick pagefile on a single drive on a different controller to the applications you'll be running usually. AFAIK there'll be hardly ANY difference, except for certain games. MMO's like SWG really suffer from this, I'm not sure about others.

Combat squirrel · 21 May 2006 at 18:22

interesting diff controller a ? oddness, I have problems with sata drives on my lanparty Silicon image3114 sata controller, all drives now on nforce 4 controller and it runs fine, on the Silicon image3114 it seems to lag and eventually got data coruption to the 1 drive on there and it then buggered the drive, dead as a dow dow now

PS: course drive cudda been on way out anyways, and it was a maxtor, whats advantage of diff controller ? surely better to exchange data internally on nforce 4 chipset ? quicker ? :confused:

J.T · 22 May 2006 at 14:40

I was always under the impression that if you have 2GB of Ram or more it is faster to turn of page file all together, that’s what I have done.

SiriusB · 22 May 2006 at 15:58

J.T said:
I was always under the impression that if you have 2GB of Ram or more it is faster to turn of page file all together, that’s what I have done.

Many people think this, but it isn't always true because the pagefile is NOT an overflow. Windows and other software use the pagefile for all sorts of reasons regardless of how much RAM you have.

SiriusB

Zefan · 22 May 2006 at 16:00

SiriusB said:
Many people think this, but it isn't always true because the pagefile is NOT an overflow. Windows and other software use the pagefile for all sorts of reasons regardless of how much RAM you have.

SiriusB

It's true.

Mercutio · 23 May 2006 at 00:57

I just stuck a small partition as first part of my raid. The seek time might make it a little less pokey (raids = slower seek as drive have to sync) but anything doing serious disk caching/usage of pagefile benefit in turn (the extra bandwidth of 2 drives).