Windows Pagefile on a different partition/HDD?

[TempestSong]

I was thinking of putting the pagefile on a different partition, or a different partition on another HDD (I have 3 of them in my current desktop) ala Linux and its swap partitions. How much of a performance boost would I get from either option?

[Netko]

Probably a performance loss actually, if you even notice anything. Vista automatically intelligently defrags your disks when there is no I/O activity, and, among other things, attempts to put the pagefile at the optimal position. By making a partition, especially one that isn't the first partition on the disk and putting your pagefile there, you're only damaging the pagefile performance by forcing it into a potentially less optimal position (it will certainly be further away from the various other caches that Vista defrag optimizes for fast access).

For XP and Vista, with today's hardware (multiGB RAM being the biggest advantage), the best thing to do is just not to mess around with that sort of stuff (pagefile, hibernation file, free RAM, etc.). The hardware has enough resources to fully utilize all the automatic performance enhancements that come with the dynamic management of resources such as the pagefile available in XP and Vista, so that by doing manual tweaking at best you'll eek out a percentage point or two in very specific situations, while on the other hand very likely making your system less stable and possibly less performing.

EDIT: There is also the less efficiency in disk free space management - that is, if you happen to need more free space in a partition, the fact that the rest of the disk has gobs of it matters exactly jack and shit. Generally, if you have a multiple disk system, you shouldn't be using partitions on Windows. If you have a single disk system, the only time you should be using 2 partitions (system, data) is if you don't have a competent backup solution in place (which you should, considering the multitudes now available).

[Xon]

Pagefile on a different(but same harddisk as some partition you actually use) partition maximizes seaktimes.

[Beowulf]

Putting the pagefile on a different disk can improve seektimes, and therefore performance. But it has to be on a different disk, not merely a different partition on the same disk.

[Pu-239]

The performance gains/losses are negligible. Don't touch it. If it's actually noticible, you need to get more RAM.

There's really no good reason to use a swap partition on Linux- the overhead has been the same since kernel 2.6, but for some reason the distro vendors haven't caught up.

[Crayz9000]

I've only got 768MB in my main computer (Ubuntu) and I've got a 2G swap partition set up. It usually uses less than 1 GB at any given time.

[TempestSong]

Hmm ok, I'll try doing it on another HDD's partition as per Beowulf/Xon.

Reason I ask is because I work with extremely memory-intensive (and completely inefficient...I'm looking at you MAYA) applications, such as AfterEffects/Premiere/Maya, and in Maya's case I had to get Windows to let the program use more memory in order to finish one of my school projects. Figured setting a pagefile somewhere else would help with fragmentations/seek times whenever I use these programs. I have 4GB of RAM, which is the maximum for a 32-bit system.

Sometimes I wish I had gone 64-bit...but at the time Vista was still bottom-of-the-barrel in terms of OSes, and XP64 was a developmental wreck.

[General Zod]

Hmm ok, I'll try doing it on another HDD's partition as per Beowulf/Xon.

Reason I ask is because I work with extremely memory-intensive (and completely inefficient...I'm looking at you MAYA) applications, such as AfterEffects/Premiere/Maya, and in Maya's case I had to get Windows to let the program use more memory in order to finish one of my school projects. Figured setting a pagefile somewhere else would help with fragmentations/seek times whenever I use these programs. I have 4GB of RAM, which is the maximum for a 32-bit system.

Sometimes I wish I had gone 64-bit...but at the time Vista was still bottom-of-the-barrel in terms of OSes, and XP64 was a developmental wreck.

You're only getting about 3.5gb of actual use out of that ram with the 32-bit cap. Although if you really want to make the most of it upgrading to Vista 64-bit now probably isn't a bad idea. I'm using that OS for my current laptop and I haven't noticed any significant compatibility or performance issues.

[Stark]

It's worth checking first to ensure the apps you work with are definately Vista 64 compatible, though; I remember at somepoint that things like Autodesk weren't porting across very well and didn't work. It'd be a bummer if you moved to 64bit (and bought another 4gb of RAM) and then found out your software didn't work.

[Isil`Zha]

Well, an indirect performance gain is related to disk fragmentation.

On it's own drive/partition the page file is one contiguous part. It's also not spread over your drive forcing other files to fragment, even after a defrag.

...still pretty negligible though.

[Xon]

Well, an indirect performance gain is related to disk fragmentation.

This is wrong.

The minimum file fragment size is 4 kilobytes, and the default memory page size is 4 kilobytes and the OS reads or writes an entire page out at once. File fragmentation has zero impact on pagefile performance, since it simply does not matter. It will always read or write a single sector/page at a time.

There is corner case when using large page sizes or "super pages", as WinNT line untill Vista as the max IO operation sizes is 64kb for NTFS formated volumes but Vista onwards can do arbitary sized writes at once. And frankly, heavy paging is death. Once you get a few gigabytes being paged/thrashed constantly it simply no longer matters if it is writing that 4 megabyte memory page in single action. Your computer will be completely unresponsive.