Best setup for the pagefile?

[manveruppd]

Allrighty, I've bought a shiny new rig, but I'm using my existing HDDs on it, and before installing Windows I'd like to get some thoughts from forum members on the best method to set up the swap file so it'll run fastest.

Disk 0 is a 180GB IDE drive divided into 4 partitions
Disk 1 is a 250GB SATA drive divided into 2 partitions

Now, back before I bought the SATA drive I had a 4GB partition on my IDE drive which was used solely for the swap file. That way it didn't get defragmented or anything, and because I put it near the beginning of the drive it was reasonably fast.

Now that I have the SATA drive as well, though, I plan to put my new installation of Windows on there. The SATA drive has twice the cache of the IDE drive so I assume it'll be faster for Windows. My natural inclination would be to also put the swap file on the same drive, since it's newer and probably slightly faster.

However, I then thought that even though the SATA drive is faster due to the bigger cache, I'll probably get better access speeds by putting the swapfile on the IDE drive. Since the two are different physical drives and are on two different buses, my computer can read/write from both drives simultaneously, which means that accessing data on the SATA drive and reading/writing to the swapfile on the IDE drive can happen simultaneously.

Opinions? Am I right in what I'm thinking or is this all complete horse doody? How do you all have your pagefiles set up across multiple drives?

 

[manveruppd]

I remember in Win98 it was advissable to fix the size of the pagefile (eg. minimum size: 2048MB, maximum size 2048MB) because there was a performance hit when Windows had to dynamically adjust its size on the fly. Is this still the case in XP, or is it ok to just leave it on auto?

 

[manveruppd]

OK, this is irrelevant to me, since I'll be using two physical drives and can therefore follow MagicBoy's advice to put the swapfile and OS on separate HDDs, but I read the following here:

I still recommend certain partitioning strategies based on disk spindles - such as placing the paging file on a separate spindle than the boot partition (i.e. \Windows).

So, if I were using a single HDD and wanted to put the swapfile on a different partition than the OS, how would I know at what point to partitiont he drive so that the two partitions are on separate spindles?

The pagefile size defaults to 1.5x the amount of RAM installed. It's probly best to set the min and max sizes to this value in a modern machine with over a 1Gb of RAM.

Alas, I bought 4GB for my new rig and I seriously think a 6GB pagefile is overkill! I might need 10GB of total memory in a few years time, but definitely not now!