page file on each drive? Speed improvment?

[Paul Knudsen]

It answers your question.

A quote from that excellent article:

If you have a second physical drive, it is in principle better to put
the file there, because it is then less likely that the heads will
have moved away from it. If, though, you have a modern large size of
RAM, actual traffic on the file is likely to be low, even if programs
are rolled out to it, inactive, so the point becomes an academic one.
If you do put the file elsewhere, you should leave a small amount on
C: — an initial size of 2MB with a Maximum of 50 is suitable — so it
can be used in emergency. Without this, the system is inclined to
ignore the settings and either have no page file at all (and complain)
or make a very large one indeed on C:

 

[mmaker]

None, If your PC has 256+ of Physical RAM the actual traffic on
the Pagefile will be minimal.

I wish.

With 1GB of RAM, if I copy a 2GB file, Windows will usually swap out
Mozilla to increase the size of the disk cache, sometimes leaving me
waiting a minute or more for the program to swap back in next time I
want to look at a web page. I loved being able to run without a page
file at all, because the whole operating system was much more
responsive when it couldn't swap out the programs I'm actually using
simply to make the disk cache bigger... unfortunately a few programs
just won't run without it.

To me, swapping out applications to make file access a little faster is
XP's second biggest problem after security... I really, really wish
they'd provided a way to set a hard limit on the disk cache size, the
way they did in Win9x. It's simply impossible for the operating system
to make caching decisions better than the user or applications (e.g. if
an application is caching vast megabytes of data itself, enlarging the
disk cache risks swapping out the data that the application has
cached!).

Mark