Sorry for being a little annoying...
But is it faster to have a page file on a separate hard drive with ATA-133 access than have it on the same partition as the OS on the RAID-0 SATA? Having the page file on another partition on the same physical disk as the OS won't gain anything - or?
(I have 1GB of RAM)
RAID-0 helps with your sequential transfer rate, but page file writes and reads are all small and random. The max and typical page file write and read is 64 KB. So RAID-0 does not help much with page file access.
Also if you have the page file on the same physical drive as the OS, but a separate partition it would actually decrease performance. This is because it would increase your average seeking distance.
Since everybody has different usage patterns I cannot say just because you have 1GB of RAM you will not benefit from moving the page file. Games like BF2 and other applications greatly benefit from more then 1GB and you may be using the page file quite a bit.
Why OS on a single stand-alone drive and not on the RAID-0 array?
As I said before a RAID-0 array helps with your sequential transfer rate. So when you are dealing with large files you will benefit. However the majority of other things you won't benefit from RAID-0 and it reduces reliability. Having the two drives separate (and on a separate controller) each drive can do work at the same time. So while you are accessing something on one drive the other can be accessing something else.
Pretty much I agree with
Zepper except that he recommends putting the page file in its own partition. The page file should be on the
least-used drive and the
most-used partition on that drive. This is because seek time is everything in drive performance. The pure transfer rate is insignificant. If it is separated from other files it will increase the average seek distance.
Also the only time it should be set static is when it is in its own partition. However as I already told you it should never have its own partition. To determine the optimal size run your most intensive application and then after a while measure your PF usage using the "&usage" counter in perfmon. The number being displayed is the percentage. So figure out actually how much the page file is being used. Then multiply this number by 4. Set that as your initial size. The max should be
at least 2x the number you just calculated. Most users are fine leaving it System Managed too, but if you want to set it manually that is the best way to do it.
2gb page file is more than enough for your 1gb of RAM.
How exactly do you know this? While you are most likely right, everybody's usage patterns are different.
As for the links
McPudd posted. The first one is good, but it misses a few points and stuff that I would of added in there. The second one I have not looked at and do not have the time to, but I bet it also has some false info or bad advice (just assuming since just about every one does).
As for the third one it has a bit of bad advice and poor advice. I won't go into any detail, but one thing I remember it saying was to put the page file outermost cylinders of the drive. You can forget about this. All this will help with is sequential transfer rate and as I already said seek time is everything.