Moving Page File to another partition - Safer? Faster?

problemo

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Is it a good idea to create a 10GB partition and use it solely to place page file? And then disable pagefile and use Eraser to securely free wipe the partition? Would this get rid of the contents inside pagefile for good? And does the speed and performance be affected if pagefile is in another partition?
 

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N0b0dy is correct about performance - if you move the paging file for performance, you should move it to another hard disk entirely. Moving it to a separate partition will not improve performance at all (in fact, if the partition is towards the outside of the physical platter(s), it can actually be slower). If you're looking simply to reduce fragmentation, turn the paging file off, defragment the drive, then turn it back on to a fixed size.

As to keeping the paging file clean, you can set the paging file to be cleared by Windows itself when you shut down or reboot the machine, which should achieve similar results.
 

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I heard different opinions on the pagefile delete option at shutdown. Some say it doesn't do a thorough job at it. That's why I wanted to disable it at certain times and free wipe the whole partition. Would this take care of the pagefile contents that was previously there?
 

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Windows 7 Home Premium 64-bitIntel Core2 Quad 8300 @ 2.5GHz8GBATI Radeon 4800 Series
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HP Elite PC
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Windows 7 Home Premium 64-bit
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Intel Core2 Quad 8300 @ 2.5GHz
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8GB
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ATI Radeon 4800 Series
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Dell 23" Widescreen
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685GB SATA3G
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HP Elite
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If you have a larger RAM (3GB or more), the pagefile will hardly ever be used - you can check that in Resource Monitor > Memory tab, the graph in the bottom right. In such a case, moving the pagefile makes no sense at all.

If you have e.g. 1GB of RAM, it will make sense to move it to another disk. 2GB of RAM is borderline and will depend a lot on the applications you run.
 

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