Where best to store Page File?

schumi84 · 3 Jul 2007 at 09:34

As per title, have recently set up a RAID 0 array on 2 Seagate Barracuda 160GB SATA II drives as needed the extra space and wanted to see an increase in performance in games and windows start up.

Although games seem to load/install quicker windows still takes ages to load, timed earlier and from the initial Windows loading screen to the log on screen took over 30secs.

I have the current page file set up on my older Seagate SATA I drive (120GB) at system managed size (showing as 2048MB) so was wondering whether this is best or whether to whack the page file onto the RAID array

Any help much appreciated.

jbloggs · 3 Jul 2007 at 10:44

Best place to have it is on another HDD on a different controller than the part/HDD that your OS is on.

Failing that, the next best place is a different HDD on the same controller.

There are many theories about what is the best way to manage the pagefile, I use a static pagefile, the min/max values set to the amount of Ram I have installed.

I'm sure others will have opinions which are equally correct.

schumi84 · 3 Jul 2007 at 13:02

I presume then that my HDs are on different controllers, as my 2 disks in RAID are on the purple connections on the mobo and my other 'backup' hd is on the orange connection.

jbloggs · 3 Jul 2007 at 13:10

I am not familiar with the layout of the Gigabyte DS3 rev.2, so have a look at your manual to see which colour (of SATA ports) refers to which controller, and if they are different, then fine.

PhillyDee · 3 Jul 2007 at 13:27

Yeah, the prurple are sata raid, the orange is the intel onboard sata. Both different controllers. I cant remember the name of the raid ones. Put your pagefile on the storage drive. Thats what i usually do.

rpstewart · 3 Jul 2007 at 13:30

PhillyDee said:
I cant remember the name of the raid ones.

They're refered to as GigaRAID but the controller is supplied by JMicron.

On the original topic I'm going to buck the trend a bit and suggest at least trying it on the RAID array. While there will be an advantage in using the storage drive and therefore reducing I/O contention the read/write speed of the storage drive will be lower than the RAID array so it might be worth putting up with the contention for faster access to the page file. The nice thing of course is that you can try both and all you need to do is reboot between.