Pagefile - RAID vs. SLED

[MechWarrior001]

So I am considering buying two new drives, but I'm curious as to what configuration will give me better pagefile performance:

Configuration A:

RAID 0 - C:\, System, Pagefile

Configuration B:

SLED 0 - C:\, System
SLED 1 - D:\, Pagefile

Which mode is better for general use/gaming?

 

[cluberti]

Depends - if the SLEDs are SSDs, they'll be faster than a mechanical driver for *most* of what you do with a paging file, and that is small random reads (90+% of paging file use is reads - 10% or less are writes). Writes will not be as big a performance delta between the two, especially over SATA 3 or SAS. However, due to the lack of the seek performance hit and the rather large performance delta between read performance on a newer (2nd or 3rd gen) SSD versus a mechanical drive (even one at 15K RPM), reads are much, much faster. Hybrid hard disks will mitigate this somewhat, so that needs to be taken into account.

Depending on what you need, you probably need to figure out "how fast is fast enough", and "how expensive do I want to go with my solution". It'll depend on what you actually want to do with the system, and how much you're willing to spend versus how much storage space you will need, basically.

 

[Mits]

I'm not an expert in gaming, but for "general use" it's good to have the pagefile on a second independent drive. If you maximize your RAM on your motherboard (e.g. to 8 GB), you will be able to reduce drastically the pagefile use by the operating system (provided you use 64-bit Windows). Even on 32-bit you could configure the surplus RAM (beyond 3 GB that is) as a RAMdrive to store the pagefile.

 

[OldMX]

In gaming the best practice is to have 2 separate disks, one for windows and pagefile and a second one for the games. And for Mits, the pagefile on ramdisk is a really bad idea, please document yourself before spreading that advise.