swap on a different drive?

[ToddAndMargo]

Hi All,

I have a laptop with two SATA hard drives installed. If I put
all my swap on the second drive (where Windows is not installed)
will that give me a speed boost? (It use to with OS2, but that was
a long time ago.)

Many thanks,
-T

 

[M.I.5¾]

Hi All,

I have a laptop with two SATA hard drives installed. If I put
all my swap on the second drive (where Windows is not installed)
will that give me a speed boost? (It use to with OS2, but that was
a long time ago.)

The swap file should be on the fastest drive, whichever one that is.

 

[Gurpreet Singh]

Distributing data and applications on different drive definitely gives a
performance boost since the IO is spread across multiple disks. It is a good
idea to keep your Os on one disk, applications and data on others. Here is
what happens

Example if you have one disk and your system has to write 5mb of data on one
disk the data will be queues to be written on one disk. If th esame 5 mb of
data is to be written on 2 disks, then the IO for 5 mb will be divided into
two, hence the performance increase is achieved.

 

[Lil' Dave]

Hi All,

I have a laptop with two SATA hard drives installed. If I put
all my swap on the second drive (where Windows is not installed)
will that give me a speed boost? (It use to with OS2, but that was
a long time ago.)

Many thanks,
-T

Doesn't make any sense to me. The "long time ago" in reference to OS2
usage, and your current use of SATA drives on the same laptop. Maybe we
have different perspectives of time. And its probably irrelevant to the
whole question?

Potential speed depends on concurrent usage of both hard drives at the same
time on the windows partition and your partition choice of the swapfile, if
that's not the case, then you're spinning your wheels.
--
Dave

CDOs are how we got here.
A modified version, new taxes in the future, is how Congress will get us
out?

 

[Lil' Dave]

Reply inline...

Distributing data and applications on different drive definitely gives a
performance boost since the IO is spread across multiple disks. It is a
good
idea to keep your Os on one disk, applications and data on others. Here is
what happens

Example if you have one disk and your system has to write 5mb of data on
one
disk the data will be queues to be written on one disk. If th esame 5 mb
of
data is to be written on 2 disks, then the IO for 5 mb will be divided
into
two, hence the performance increase is achieved.

And that's if both can be accessed at the same time.
Otherwise, there's a waiting period for one drive to finish before the other
can be accessed. All is nulled in time, plus the waiting factor as well.
--
Dave

CDOs are how we got here.
A modified version, new taxes in the future, is how Congress will get us
out?

 

[Twayne]

Hi All,

I have a laptop with two SATA hard drives installed. If I put
all my swap on the second drive (where Windows is not installed)
will that give me a speed boost? (It use to with OS2, but that was
a long time ago.)

Many thanks,
-T

Yes, no and maybe<g>. For day to day normal operations you aren't
likely to notice any differences. When you might notice differences
would be when you have many programs all running and doing something at
once, or when using a memory intensive program that does a lot of number
crunching or video operations.

The idea is that the page file beign on another drive, it can be
accessing the page file at the same time it's accessing the program
instructions and thereby speed things up a bit for intensive operations.

So if you have a slow computer you wish to fix, it's not likely to help
anything in any noticeable way, but it might help some if you are
running very lean on RAM and need a lot of pagefile work at all times.
In this case, more RAM will result in much better speed improvements
than moving the pagefile.

It won't hurt anything, but it may not help either. Try it and see.

Cheers,

Twayne

 

[ToddAndMargo]

Yes, no and maybe<g>. For day to day normal operations you aren't
likely to notice any differences. When you might notice differences
would be when you have many programs all running and doing something at
once, or when using a memory intensive program that does a lot of number
crunching or video operations.

The idea is that the page file beign on another drive, it can be
accessing the page file at the same time it's accessing the program
instructions and thereby speed things up a bit for intensive operations.

So if you have a slow computer you wish to fix, it's not likely to help
anything in any noticeable way, but it might help some if you are
running very lean on RAM and need a lot of pagefile work at all times.
In this case, more RAM will result in much better speed improvements
than moving the pagefile.

It won't hurt anything, but it may not help either. Try it and see.

Cheers,

Twayne

Hi Twayne,

Thank you for the input. I have been noticing in my task
manager that several programs will load into both regular
memory and Virtual Memory, even when there is plenty of
regular memory available. For instance, my Firefox (not
on the laptop in question) is currently running 28Meg regular
and 24Meg virtual. Hopefully, this is where I will see
speed improvements in the laptop's programs.

Many thanks,
-T

 

[Daave]

I have been noticing in my task manager that several
programs will load into both regular memory and Virtual
Memory, even when there is plenty of regular memory
available.

That is how Windows works. It always uses Virtual Memory, even if it is
just to assign Virtual Memory to an application.

For instance, my Firefox (not
on the laptop in question) is currently running 28Meg regular
and 24Meg virtual. Hopefully, this is where I will see
speed improvements in the laptop's programs.

I doubt you will notice any huge improvement by moving the pagefile to
another physical drive. It's not necessarily a bad idea, and there might
be tiny improvement, but the only situation that will produce big
improvement is increasing RAM if there is not enough. Hopefully, you
already have enough. If not, purchasing extra RAM shouldn't cost that
much money.

A quick way to determine if you have enough RAM is to open Task Manager
(Ctrl+Alt+Del) and click the Performance tab. Then note the three values
under Commit Charge (K): in the lower left-hand corner: Total, Limit,
and Peak.

The Total figure represents the amount of memory you are using at that
very moment. The Peak figure represents the highest amount of memory you
used since last bootup. If both these figures are below the value of
Physical Memory (K) Total, then you probably have plenty of RAM.

Also, you may explore this further by running Page File Monitor for
Windows XP:

http://www.dougknox.com/xp/utils/xp_pagefilemon.htm