How to move paging file to another physical hdd in Win7

Hi,

i have 4gb ram and 2 hard drives on my computer, one is 10000rpm 32GB velociraptor used as a system disk and second is 7200rpm WD 500gb! I want to move paging file to the second disc because of low space on system drive! I know how to do that but i want to know the correct way of doing this! Because some resources claims that it is good to keep around 1GB on the OS drive because Windows needs still some pagefile space on the OS drive i.e. here:
http://mintywhite.com/vista/vmaintenance/performance-boost-move-page-file-to-another-physical-drive/
somwhere i've read to left the minimum paging file on the system drive which is i mean 16mb and some resources claims that the correct way is to disable absolutely paging on the system drive and move it whole to the second physicial drive i.e. here:
http://social.technet.microsoft.com...f/thread/90088949-0a59-4e9f-bea0-f2033c0e7add !
So which one of these ways are most correct? If i disable completely paging on the system drive it will not be a significant performance hit? How it is with paging in Win7 x64? What is your opinion and why it so? And finally how big static size of page file i have to set?

I am aware of that i probably lower performance by moving page file from faster system drive to slower!

Many thanks for answers!

I always move my PF and never leave one on the boot drive because I have never seen where it makes a difference. Try it both ways if you want and see what works best for you and your hardware. No harm done.

I am aware of that i probably lower performance by moving page file from faster system drive to slower!

Click to expand...

Not necessarily. With 4Gb of RAM installed, Windows and your CPU have lots of space work in and keep in system RAM most of the data it needs. While it will still use the page file, it will not be for the most critically needed data. Also, a hard drive can only do things one at a time. So when your system needs data off the system drive, it cannot use the PF at the same time. But if the PF is on a 2nd drive, it can access both at once.

You should not disable Paging altogether. As for size of a static PF, 1.5 x RAM is a normal rule of thumb, but I think that is outdated, good when people had 128 or 256Mb of RAM installed, not 4Gb. So keeping an eye on the Performance Tab in Task Manager can show you how much you really need. That said, Windows really is pretty good at managing the PF, and Win7 is even better. Unless you are desperately low on free disk space, I would just let Windows manage it - it knows what it's doing.

Here's how I do it.

1. Clean the clutter off drive 2. Use CCleaner or Windows own Disk Cleanup.
2. Defrag drive 2.
3. Create new PF, delete old PF
4. Reboot.

sanjuro said:

Hi,

i have 4gb ram and 2 hard drives on my computer, one is 10000rpm 32GB velociraptor used as a system disk and second is 7200rpm WD 500gb! I want to move paging file to the second disc because of low space on system drive! I know how to do that but i want to know the correct way of doing this! Because some resources claims that it is good to keep around 1GB on the OS drive because Windows needs still some pagefile space on the OS drive i.e. here:
Performance Boost: Move Page File to Another Physical Drive | Windows Vista Maintenance | Windows Tools, Help & Guides
somwhere i've read to left the minimum paging file on the system drive which is i mean 16mb and some resources claims that the correct way is to disable absolutely paging on the system drive and move it whole to the second physicial drive i.e. here:
Changing the location of the Paging File !
So which one of these ways are most correct? If i disable completely paging on the system drive it will not be a significant performance hit? How it is with paging in Win7 x64? What is your opinion and why it so? And finally how big static size of page file i have to set?

I am aware of that i probably lower performance by moving page file from faster system drive to slower!

Many thanks for answers!

Click to expand...

.
My understanding is you need a pagefile on the system drive so Windows has a place to do "memory dumps" in case of crashes. The default minimum size for a 4 gig machine is 200 megs (kernel memory dump). You can do without it, but if you have a crash you won't have the dump files to look at afterward to try and figure out what happened.

If you want to make the pagefile a fixed size I would make it a little larger then the size Windows recommends. This doesn't have to be rocket science. As long as you don't get "out of virtual memory" errors it's large enough. Regarding performance, although the secondary drive is slower you might actually see similar or even better performance because reads/writes to the pagefile can occur simultaneously with read/writes to the primary drive. Probably the only way you could tell the difference would be with benchmarking software though.

Hi there
I'd move the SYSTEM first and then put the paging file on the FAST DISK.

You can actually have the system disk on the slowest drive because once core components of the OS have been loaded at boot very little needs to be loaded up from the system -- common components if they aren't already in memory will have already been loaded on to the paging disk anyway.

It's a MISCONCEPTION to assume that the OS itself should be on the fastest disk -- the only advantage might be a slightly faster boot time and initial load of some applications such as photoshop - but the slight disadvantage you gain will be MORE than offset by the faster I/O you have available for paging and application Scratch files -- Photoshop will works streets better if you can allocate one of its scratch areas on to the fast disk as well.


90% of POOR computer performance is due to horrible I/O configurations.

Move the system file via Acronis etc.

Then just allocate space for your paging file via Contol Panel ==> system===> advanced system settings .

Cheers
jimbo

I'd move the SYSTEM first and then put the paging file on the FAST DISK.

Click to expand...

I am not arguing that this would likely result in better performance, but moving the OS to another disk is no simple task, and comes with many potential risks. This should only be done after considerable homework, and a verified backup.

Page File

here is what I have done I have two 36 gig 10,000 RPM Raptors on disk one sits the OS and on disk two I created two partitions the first one a four gig partition for the swap files and the rest of the space in partition two is for backup storage in performance benchmarks I get better disk performance with the page file setup this way

computersplus said:

here is what I have done I have two 36 gig 10,000 RPM Raptors on disk one sits the OS and on disk two I created two partitions the first one a four gig partition for the swap files and the rest of the space in partition two is for backup storage in performance benchmarks I get better disk performance with the page file setup this way

Click to expand...

that is not a bad idea

For all:
ok thanks for your answers!!!

Disk

remember the outer tracks of a drive are able to be accessed faster so that works the best for swap

computersplus said:

remember the outer tracks of a drive are able to be accessed faster so that works the best for swap

Click to expand...

so when i will be creating partitions on my drive first partition that i create must be swap partition in order to resize on outer tracks? and second for data? thanks

swap

if your gonna do it on your OS drive you have to assign a different drive letter than C for your swap Like "S" for swap or "P" for page file lol....

computersplus said:

if your gonna do it on your OS drive you have to assign a different drive letter than C for your swap Like "S" for swap or "P" for page file lol....

Click to expand...

no finally i am not going to do that on my OS drive

computersplus said:

if your gonna do it on your OS drive you have to assign a different drive letter than C for your swap Like "S" for swap or "P" for page file lol....

Click to expand...

What you mean is you can have zero PF on C. Allocate all PF to 2nd HDD.

I have always made a point to install my OS on to a single drive that is slower then my secondary drive or raid set. I currently have my OS on a 7200 RPM SATA150 drive and I have a pair of 160GB 7200 RPM SATAII drives running Raid-0 with two partitions, one 7GB partition for my paging file and the rest as a single partition that I installed all of my programs on to. I have noticed that this gives me a longer boot time when loading Windows, but all of my games and such load much faster. I am running Windows 7 Professional 32bit with 4GB of ram.