Put Vista Pagefile on other hard drive?

cje · 20 Jul 2009 at 21:26

Hi guys,

I have Vista x64 on a Sammy F1 640gb HDD, and I use a WD Blue 640gb as a storage drive. Now I read somewere, that you can place the Vista pagefile on the 2nd physical hard drive, or even on both to increase performance.

Does anyone reccomend doing this? Will it improve performance at all? Is there a chance I mess up my install?

Never messed about with the pagefile before, always let the system manage it.

theheyes · 20 Jul 2009 at 21:33

I'd just leave it alone to be honest.

Django x2 · 20 Jul 2009 at 21:35

Yip, unless you have uber memory which would need to be written to large disk space in the event of a dump I'd leave it as system managed. Vista does a very damn good job of managing the PF

Columbo · 20 Jul 2009 at 21:41

Leave it alone mate. I did this once, things went well for a while then one day vista just refused to boot and quoted me some dodgy pagefile error.

No amount of messing around fixed and it resulted in a full format.

cje · 20 Jul 2009 at 22:35

Thought that might me the case. Steer well clear of it I will then. Cheers all.

Kennysevenfold · 20 Jul 2009 at 22:58

Lucero said:
Vista does a very damn good job of managing the PF

chaosophy · 21 Jul 2009 at 00:07

Personalty if the HDDs are of equal speeds I'd split what ever it recommends and put half on each drive. I'd rather have it at a set size than have it shrink or want to grow into disk space that isn't there. At least if it's set you know you've lost that space.

It is odd though that MS give you these options and that there seems to be no hard and fast rules as to how to set it? Everyone seems to have their own ideas. And none seem to be right.

V4NT0M · 21 Jul 2009 at 01:41

Don't know why you all have such a problem with this, I regularly move my pagefile away from the main drive with no problem.

Means less simultaneous red/writes to the same hdd.

ShakenNstirred · 21 Jul 2009 at 03:09

yeah i always move it to my second drive
never had a problem with moving it

AbsenceJam · 21 Jul 2009 at 04:07

Fixed size on different drive.

FatRakoon · 21 Jul 2009 at 04:07

I spread mine across however many drives I have.

I have 6 HDs in my main PC and so, I have put 1024 onto the first 4.

The last 2 have junk and my Torrents so I wont benefit from using those.

IU have done this since Win95 and it NEVER fails me and I feel that I actually benefit from a speed increase because when Windows needs to use a pagefile, if one drive is in use, it access a different drive.

Had I only had one drive ,then it will be slow as ****.

This way I fel is much better

Also splitting a pagefile across multiple partitions is not beficial at all.

I have done it for sure, but only because of habit but there is no reason to. If you have one drive then dump a large pagefile in C:

And make it a set size too!

Windows has been written to use a Pagefile, so turning it off will actually mean that Windows will make temporary ones anyway, thus slowing your system down.

So, make a fairly usefully sized one no matter how much RAM you have.