Putting the page file on different partitions...

Originally posted by CozMoDan
I am not sure why anyone would partition a drive to start with.

1. I have o/s and apps on one partition, all music/videos and backups of stuff on second partition. If windows goes insane, gets a virus, etc, I format just that partition, reinstall, and all my other stuff is still there.

Pagefile stuff was important in some of the prior o/s's, but winxp has a pretty damn efficient memory management system IMO.

I have mine set up on a separate parition on the drive for another reason, that being it's the first thing on the drive (physically speaking). It is installed before anything else on the other partition, so windows organizes it to the front of the drive, which should help access times (although I admit I could be wrong here). I just took the numbers that windows had assigned to the C partition by default, and essentially copied them over to my D. The exacts are 1536-3072MB.

Ps. I like pizza.

Originally posted by CozMoDan
Guys I would like to say a few things and not to piss anyone off. But partitions on the same drive will not allow reading of multiple files at the same time.

I don't recall anybody on here saying that partitions on the same drive would allow reading of multiple files at the same time. Also I don't see how anything you typed in your reply would piss someone off. Unless there's a hidden buliwyf joke somewhere in there.

There are many good reasons for splitting up hard drives into separate partitions and Bullhead already mentioned some of them.

#1: you don't want your page file on the same partition as your OS install so if your OS is on your fastest hard drive then it's in your best interest to create at least another partition for the entire page file or a portion of it.

#2: it is possible for partitions to become corrupt or for viruses to only affect specific partitions. So it's helpful for security reasons to have them although not crucial.

#3: it makes it much easier to manage fragmented drives when you split up your partitions based on what gets the most disk usage (ie a game only drive where you're constantly installing and uninstalling large files)

ps I like pizza too

pps cozmodan I didn't go into details about RAID because I didn't want to scare Jeffro off

QUOTE:
You can get faster performance by splitting up your pagefile across several hard drives since XP will read the data across all of the drives simultaneously.
END QUOTE
Bri this is what I was talking about. I am unaware of the feature in XP. Not saying that it is not there, just don't know about it. I know that you could create software stripping through disk mgr in WINNT. But in order for this to be effective would you want the drives on different buss (channels) which in most mobo would be two? Anyway that is a cool feature if it is available.

Originally posted by CozMoDan
QUOTE:
You can get faster performance by splitting up your pagefile across several hard drives since XP will read the data across all of the drives simultaneously.
END QUOTE
Bri this is what I was talking about. I am unaware of the feature in XP. Not saying that it is not there, just don't know about it.

For that specific piece of info, I'm relying on the XP expert column on the official microsoft site. http://www.microsoft.com/WindowsXP/expertzone/columns/mcfedries/03june16.asp

RAID is still the best method for trying to get simultaneous reads on separate hard drives but when it comes to just the pagefile, apparently XP has the ability to extract data from more than 1 drive even if it's not a RAID setup. Honestly I understand why you have doubts about it because I find it hard to believe as well.