Originally posted by: Nothinman
It would not perform as well as if it were on a seperate physical drive but it would still perform better then having it on the same partision as Windows (ussually C)
Not really. Putting it on another partition will just increase seek times because every pagefile access will cause the disk to have to seek between partitions, if the pagefile were in the middle of the partition holding Windows the seek times would be lowered because the heads would have a shorter distance to go.
I feel that having it in it's own little partition cuts down on fragementation and that helps reliability for the filing system.
If your pagefile is being expanded and causing fragmentation you either need to turn up the minimum size or buy more memory and frankly the slowdown caused by fragmentation will be nothing compared to the slowdown caused by just needing to page in and out of the pagefile.
I couldn't care less about the performance. You say first that the seek times would decrease performance, but the filing system fragmentation doesn't matter because it's so slow as to be pointless to even care about the performance drop, which is it?
My reasoning has little to nothing to do with speed. I would just need it for the odd time that I would actually use the page file for something stupid... say a run away proccess.
The page file usually bogarts a portion of the filing system that can never be recovered for other uses or moved.
So? Every OS does that, the only difference is with most unixes it's a whole partition instead of a big file in another partition.
Yes, so make it a seperate partition like every other OS. Just because it still a file, doesn't mean that I can't just stick a extra 2 gigs of harddrive space aside for a partition for it, or that I shouldn't.
The swap file is dynamicly sized to fit whatever your needs are, it gets bigger if you need it on one or two occasions, and parts of it just don't go back to being smaller...
It may not be a issue in fresh installs, but once you start layering on the service packs as the OS ages, then it improves long term reliability.
Pagefile location has no affect on reliability.
No But I figure fragmentation of OS files on a NTFS partition may have reliablity issues, if your unlucky. If you have to do a recovery or investigation of some system files what are the chances of fixing files if they are all in one spot vs spread all over the harddrive?
It's not like it's a BIG DEAL or anything. It's just something that may be a good idea. On a scale of 1 to 10 of "stuff that realy matters" I give this a important of 1.5.
I give the importance of a performance drop of a page file seek caused by a seperate partition for the swap file of about 1.3. So 1.5 > 1.3, so I stick it in a seperate partition.
Sort of like installing the core OS and program files on seperate partitions... I don't think that the performance hit would be any were near as significant as the possible benifits.
For Windows there's virtually no benefit to doing that since Windows puts 1/3 of it's files into 'Program Files' anyway and you need to do a reinstall for just about everything to make sure all of the files and registry entries are put back. For unix it makes more sense because /usr can be mounted read-only for normal use or it can be NFS mounted from another server.
I didn't say anything about Unix or Linux or whatever. I know that MS choices of directory system/monolythic registry/mixing files is @ss....
The only thing I am thinking of is reducing filing system fragmentation, and the obviously negative benifits that is has on a w2k OS. That's it.
If I can aviod reshuffling around system files during a defrag, I figure that's a good thing. That's the only thing that I was thinking about.
Now if taking extra steps to avoid or at least cut down on filing system fragmentation isn't worth even the meakest effort, then tell me why.
I know on filing systems that fragmentation is sometimes a GOOD thing. But I am not aware of anything but negative effects with w2k + ntfs or for that matter FAT32.