Upgrading to SATA II

If a 2GB DDR 400 mHz system has SATA I drives on mobo and an add-on PCI card is attached to add a Western Digital Caviar Black SATA-II 1 TB -

The O.S. is installed to SATA-II drive. Do you think there would be benefit under this situation to move the page file to a slower SATA-I drive since it a different physical drive?

Or would the page file perform better on the SATA-II drive, even with the O.S. on this same drive?

Opinions or anyone with experience testing this?

torrentg said:

If a 2GB DDR 400 mHz system has SATA I drives on mobo and an add-on PCI card is attached to add a Western Digital Caviar Black SATA-II 1 TB -

The O.S. is installed to SATA-II drive. Do you think there would be benefit under this situation to move the page file to a slower SATA-I drive since it a different physical drive?

Or would the page file perform better on the SATA-II drive, even with the O.S. on this same drive?

Opinions or anyone with experience testing this?

A secondary drive, on a second controller is optimal. Simultaneous read/writes are possible this way, plus the controllers are not q'ing activity.

That's what I though as well. Thanks!

I assume the hard drives are mechanical. In which case mechanical HDDs hardly fill up a SATA 1 (1.5gb/s) connection. And most certainly never get close to utilizing a SATA 2 (3 gb/s) connection. Probably the only thing that would help performance is Native Command Queuing, which is available to AHCI is enabled.

But to answer your question, the page file will perform as well as it could on the SATA 1 connection.

Add 2G more of memory for $30 and not worry about the page file.

But if you don't want to do that, then it really just depends on the speed of your drives. As mentioned before, Sata I is 150MB/s and Sata II is 300MB/s I have one of the fastest drives out there and my Max Read for a SEQ file is around 130MB/s which is still fine for Sata I. So the interface really isn't going to matter much.

having it on a 2nd Drive can help but again, just depends on what you have going on on the other drive. I still have my swap file on my main C drive, I really haven't noticed any benefit to moving it to a 2nd drive because my C: drive really doesn't get used that much and everything is cached to memory first anyway. I think the only time you will really see performance gains from moving your swap file around is if you max out your physical memory. In which case, back to what I originally said, get more memory.