I hope this helps answer your question which was:
"my main question is about 2 hard drives" See my quote from Ed Bott's Vista
inside out below, and I recommend you read the section he has on the paging
file at your local book store if you don't have a copy.
Sometimes, you can improve your situation by managing the paging file
yourself, and anyone who says letting windows manage it under all conditions
is over simplifying and robbing you of some options to make your system more
stable and perform faster.
The most complellingargument for setting paging file size and limit manually
is to eliminate growing of the paging file when it is set by the system aka
"windows manages it." When the system manages it, it will monitor the size
of the paging file, and will then automatically make it larger when needed.
This causes two problems.
First, it will cause a noticeable delay for all apps running on your
box,because the pc has to expand the paging file and this is a hard disc
intensive operation. Second, allowing the system to grow and shrink the
paginf file causes fragmentation errors. Your paging file should not have
file fragments, and this is another reason to let one of the better
defraggers like Perfect Disk or Disk Keeper defrag the paging file at boot.
Before defragmentation can be successful however, the paging file needs to
have a constant size. If the paging file is allowed to grow frequently, and
the defragger has no clue how much, the defrag utility can't put the file on
the hard drive on a place where it won't get fragmented, as in the case
where you set it to a constant size.
There can be disadvantages to setting paging file size manually.
Size is important. If you set the paging file and say it takes up 5GB, that
is lost disk space. When you set the file siz manually, you are setting a
limit that your pc can't exceed. If you run a memory intensive app, and
your limit is too low, the paging file will fill up, and programs could
crash and you can get out of memory errors just as when you disable a paging
file if you have less than 2GB of RAM.
AYK-- a lot of XP MSKBs do apply to Vista, and they aren't in any hurry even
to update them with Vista lables reminding me a little of the goofey
byzantine Symantec KB articles, one more reason why I kicked Norton
products to the curb long ago--that and there erratic uninstalls and erratic
performance and stilted manual update requirement unless you want to wait
once a week.
I have found one thing to be true of RAM and Vista and XP. Once you have
even 1 GB of RAM, all the adjusting of RAM and Virtual memory doesn't seem
to make a difference. And although I do move my paging file to simply
another drive than the system drive because so many Windows experts have
recommended to do so, I haven't seen a lot of difference.
Let me know if you can demonstrate on any of your boxes that adjusting
Virtual RAM or moving the page file really makes a significant difference in
performance when the box has over one GB of RAM--and I expect most of yours
do. I haven't been able to demonstrate that to myself, and I've been trying
over the years.
Check out:
RAM, Virtual Memory, Pagefile and all that stuff
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/555223/en-us
From Ed Bott in Vista Inside Out:
"Should you get involved in paging file management and how?"
"If you have more than one drive, moving the paging file to a fast drive
that is not your system drive is a good idea. Using multiple paging files
that are split over two or more physical discs is an even better idea,
because your disc controller can process multiple requests to read and write
data concurrently. Don't make the mistake of creating two or more paging
files using multiple volumes on a single physical disc, however.
*If you have a single hard disc that contains C, D, and E volumes, for
example, and you split the page file over two or more of these, you may
actually make your computer run more slowly than before.* In that
configuration, the heads on the physical discs have to do more work, loading
pages from different parts of the physical disc sequentially, rather than
loading data from a single contiguous region of the hard disc.
If your are short of hard disc space, you might consider setting a smaller
inital page file size. You can use a handy script from Windows MVP Bill
James to monitor current page file usage and session peak usage. This tool
free at
http://billsway.com/notes_public/WinXP_Tweaks/ was written for
Windows XP but works fine for Vista."
Read more in Ed Bott's book at 747.
This is the theory, although as I said, I haven't seen much difference on a
box that has 1GB of RAM or more.
The paging file is a way to hand over more memory when programs demand it.
Windows tries to solve this by taking a snaphsot of a memory chunk and
tossing it to the HD so the demanding program can use it. The program it
borrowed from is going to demand that memory back, and when it does, a hard
page fault happens. The snapshots are virtual memory that sits in the paging
files. If your virtual memory is on the same disc as your programs, then
Windows has to strain or fly around like a chicken with its head cut off to
keep all the programs going. Bringing the snapshot into memory may force
another snap shot, and another, and so on.
If the paging file is on another disc, that doesn't have your programs,
windows can run faster if it juggles two discs at the same time--provided
you have the room.
You can use the Resource monitor to monitor how many page faults you're
getting--and if you're getting several--say a couple dozen hard faults per
second--you should consider putting paging files on two or more fast hard
drives if you have them.
http://windowshelp.microsoft.com/Windows/en-US/Help/b9dca7ff-88b6-4d8b-9ca2-49cff3cd1c951033.mspx
If you disable the paging file and don't have enough RAM, your programs will
refuse to load and will crash. If you stick to the 2GB minimum, you won't
have problems. If you don't, you'll get out of memory messages, and the
programs could crash and in some of them you could lose your work.
If you have over 2GB of RAM on your box, you can consider disabling the
paging file. If not, forget it. This will cause faster memory access and
management than is physically possible for your RAM.
CH
