Paging file question

[phatthefirst]

Hi guys, so i read somewhere that moving your paging file to another physical hard drive is a good idea.

my question is, because i have an old 250 GB hard drive with vista on it that i am not using, is it worth the effort to to install this hard drive onto my current computer and move the paging file to there? and can i leave vista on it and have the paging file there as well?

One last thing, i have made the paging file 8 GB, no more, no less. is this recommended? my ram is 4 gb

Thanks

 

[killersquirel11]

An 8GB page file should be fine, if you really want to waste time calculating it out, read this article:
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/889654

Using a second hard drive for a page file might bring about some small benefits:
1) It'll save wear and tear on your primary hard drive (If you have a mechanical hard drive, this is pointless. If you have a SSD, leaving the page file on it might eventually kill it (after many years))
2) It'll free up your main drive for useful traffic.
A page file is basically a place on the hard drive where the OS can store infrequently-used sections of memory (called pages, hence the name). As long as you have ample memory, the page file goes relatively unused. Once memory usage starts getting high, the OS has to use the page file more and more. If you use 100% memory, the OS will be pretty much constantly moving stuff to and from the page file (called thrashing). If you're consistently above ~80% memory usage, I'd suggest buying another 4GB of RAM (it's cheap these days).

So to make a long answer short:
Yes, you might notice a small speed increase
Yes, you can leave Vista on there
Yes, 8GB is fine for page file

and since it should take under half an hour, I'd say go ahead. Then you can also use the extra storage if need be (throw any large media collections on there, or use it as a backup drive (I use a scheduled xcopy script to do backups), whatever floats your boat)
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/307886
http://mintywhite.com/vista/vmaintenance/performance-boost-move-page-file-to-another-physical-drive/

On a side note, 8GB is the number of the paging, and the number of the paging shall be 8GB

 

[nikorr]

Hi guys, so i read somewhere that moving your paging file to another physical hard drive is a good idea.

my question is, because i have an old 250 GB hard drive with vista on it that i am not using, is it worth the effort to to install this hard drive onto my current computer and move the paging file to there? and can i leave vista on it and have the paging file there as well?

One last thing, i have made the paging file 8 GB, no more, no less. is this recommended? my ram is 4 gb

Thanks

Its good if your system is HDD and u have more than 2 HDD's available. If u have an SSD, keep it on it so u can benefit from the speed.

And if u put it on 2 or 3 drives, it will RAID the page itself to be faster.

Use RAM + 1.5, so if u have 8GB of RAM u can use 20GB page, if u have enough of the space.

But benefits for the home user between 8GB and 20GB is minimal.

 

[phatthefirst]

Yeah I have 1 hdd in my pc it's a caviar black 500gb. thats quite fast, so i guess i'll just leave the page file there. Thanks for helping!

 

[phatthefirst]

Best answer selected by phatthefirst.

 

[nikorr]

Yeah I have 1 hdd in my pc it's a caviar black 500gb. thats quite fast, so i guess i'll just leave the page file there. Thanks for helping!

When I used to use HDD for the system, I made a partition on the beginning of the drive so it has faster access to the heads and format it Fat32 for faster access.

 

[nikorr]

This topic has been closed by Nikorr.

 

[nikorr]

This topic has been closed by Nikorr