Legit Reviews

I've searched. The internet.

And I want Legit opinions on this subject for my specific case, not "generally speaking."

I have 4GB RAM and three hard drives. One 150GB Raptor with Vista Ultimate x64 (fresh install) on it, and a pair of Western Digital Caviar 750GB AAKS drives (no RAID, just two separate disks). Where should I put my page file(s) and how large should they be for best overall system performance (i.e. on the desktop and in 3D/CAD where I spend most of my time these days)?

System managed on every drive, Windows does a good job of using the fastest drive depending on what else is using the drive at the time, automatically.

If you want the fastest possible performance, you should partiton off the first 20% of the drive (I can't remember if it is a much as 20% but its around there) and use it for your OS and swap, (and maybe games etc), as this partition will be on the part of the drive that spins fastest so will have a slightly better read/write/response rate for general use.

But still keep it system managed on that partition.

Dan

I always put the swap file on the drive that doesnt have my OS on it. I install all programs to the drive with the OS on it then use other drives for data.

Same deal if I try to take a dvd and make it a xvid - always use 2 drives, one to read form and one to write to, for better performance.

Mike

for cad - I would also recommend setting the render drive as the drive that doesnt contain the program also.
same for video editing.

I have NEVER partitioned a drive off in sections since I tried and found there is such a minimal if any difference in speed. It is nice to reinstall OS's, but you still have to reinstall all the programs for the other partitions since windows wont find them anyway ;)

DMB2000uk wrote:If you want the fastest possible performance, you should partiton off the first 20% of the drive (I can't remember if it is a much as 20% but its around there) and use it for your OS and swap, (and maybe games etc), as this partition will be on the part of the drive that spins fastest so will have a slightly better read/write/response rate for general use.

But still keep it system managed on that partition.

Any good defragmentation program is going to organize your most frequently used stuff onto the fast parts of the drive in any case.

KnightRid wrote:I always put the swap file on the drive that doesnt have my OS on it. I install all programs to the drive with the OS on it then use other drives for data.

Keep in mind that Windows automatically uses the drive with the best performance, so unless you're hurting for free space, you might as well let it be system managed on every drive, and let the OS take care of it.

KnightRid wrote:for cad - I would also recommend setting the render drive as the drive that doesnt contain the program also.
same for video editing.

If you've got enough memory, this won't make much of a difference, since once the program is open, it's not using the drive a whole lot other than for renders.

KnightRid wrote:I have NEVER partitioned a drive off in sections since I tried and found there is such a minimal if any difference in speed. It is nice to reinstall OS's, but you still have to reinstall all the programs for the other partitions since windows wont find them anyway ;)

Same here, anything that partitioning does for single drives can in most cases be accomplished just using directories instead.

All in all, Windows does a good job of managing the page file. If there were any easy tweaks to improve performance, MS would implement them to be automatic, they're not all idiots.