pagefile.sys

stormy13 · 20 Apr 2011

Ztruker said:

I always beleived it was better to have the pagefile on a separate hard drive if possible as it can reduce hard drive head contention. By this I mean if you are running a program that is reading from or writing to the hard drive and a page fault occurs, the head has to be moved from where it is to the pagefile area, do it's thing, then move back to where it was. If the pagefile is on a 2nd hard drive then no additional head movement occurs on the 1st drive. I've not read anything anywhere that indicates this is different for Windows 7.

I have been doing the same since I went to more than a single drive a long time ago.

This sums it up pretty well as to how to set the pagefile,

TweakHound - Tweaking Windows 7, Page 7

**cluberti** · 20 Apr 2011

You only need to actually fault data from disk to memory is if it's a hard fault. If you have sufficient RAM, you should rarely see hard faults compared to soft faults.

Layback Bear · 21 Apr 2011

Thank you stormy13. That website tells it like it is. It's hard to outsmart Windows 7. In my opinion Windows 7 handles page filing and ram just great. Just a note. It's hard to break the habit of tinkering with these things like we use to with older systems.

scrotiny · 21 Apr 2011

Ztruker said:

Also, if you have the pagefile on a 2nd drive and remove that drive, Windows (any version) will then create one on the boot drive. I believe it's worked that way since Win 95. You will probably get an error message but Windows will still boot and run okay.

That is what I've found will happen if there are problems whilst having the pagefile on a different disk than the OS.

stereo · 21 Apr 2011

I have now the pagefile on the C partition. I don't see any difference. Nothing :)

**cluberti** · 21 Apr 2011

Considering the paging file is mostly read from, and not written to, you usually would not.