Windows Vista PageFile - Technical

[3x3cut10n3r]

I am going to ask a question which I guess I know the answer to but just wanted some opinions.

As you all know, it is common sense to have the Windows PageFile on seperate drive to the OS, in my case, Vista x64.

However, the dilemma is this; my current paging drives are 7,200RPM SATA II drives, which in itself is fine but due to a new configuration my OS drive is now 2 x 10,000RPM in a RAID-0 array.

The question is, would it be better to have the PageFile on the 2 x 10,000RPM RAID-0 array drive, even though it has the OS on it or keep it on the slower 7,200RPM drive with no OS?

My guess is the put it on the OS drive, thoughts?

[Commander Marklar]

Windows requires you have a page file on the host drive big enough to hold a system dump (from memory, how much?) if it blows up*. There's little point in splitting it across drives. The OS is on the fastest drive so just leave it

The page file is kept reasonably well ordered by modern Windows systems.

edit: You can override XP/2003 behaviour, unsure about Vista.

[Number45]

You can still override Vista. I personally would suggest that the pagefile be stored away from the OS so that it can access both system files and the pagefile at the same time.

Not too much bother setting it up though, so you could try both ways and run some tests to see if it makes any difference.

[briareos_kerensky]

You can still override Vista. I personally would suggest that the pagefile be stored away from the OS so that it can access both system files and the pagefile at the same time.

I agree. With Vista being a resource hog, I bet it accesses the swap space quite often, especially if you have 1 or 2 GBs of RAM.

[Commander Marklar]

There are performance tools to monitor this kind of use. Use them, don't guess You'll then be able to see if keeping it on the same drive consumes less time seeking to a page file than it does 'asynchronously' on another, slower drive.