Paging file on removable media

[ggallin]

I ran into problems after upgrading from W2K (sp4) to WXP (sp2).

XP rejected my external firewire Lacie drive as a place for the paging file. With 2000 it worked okay. Is there a way to perhaps make some modification to registry so that I could set pagefile to the Lacie hd?

I'm thinking that if this is not going to work out, I'll just buy a separate raid controller & another hd.. the system is just so much slower with the paging file on same controller with operating system.

[tazdevl]

I ran into problems after upgrading from W2K (sp4) to WXP (sp2).

XP rejected my external firewire Lacie drive as a place for the paging file. With 2000 it worked okay. Is there a way to perhaps make some modification to registry so that I could set pagefile to the Lacie hd?

I'm thinking that if this is not going to work out, I'll just buy a separate raid controller & another hd.. the system is just so much slower with the paging file on same controller with operating system.

Makes no sense to put that on an external drive. Assuming you hit the paging file fairly often, there's a pretty big performance hit involved. Better to create a separate parition on your RAID volume/hard drive and locate it there.

[ggallin]

What I actually am after is that I could make my system faster without extra expenses. So I would appreciate if anyone knows how to break this removable drive limitation for paging file.

[tazdevl]

You're missing the point. You're going to slow your system down if you move your paging file to the removable drive. Latency will go up and and transfer rates will go down.

I'll say it again, this time listen (I'm a system engineer, one would hope I knew what I was taking about)... not a good idea.

Easiest way to increase your performance is to add RAM which decreases the use of the paging file.

[pranav81]

tazdevl is right.If the paging file is on an external drive,then there is definitely performance decrement.

I would suggest that you keep the paging file on an internal drive and increase the RAM to improve overall performance.


::Pranav::

[ggallin]

Guess what. You haven't used my system. It WAS faster with pagefile on the external firewire HD instead of the same system/boot drive. When I have pf on my system (internal) drive, I have to wait for windows and menus to draw on the screen, after using a memory-hungry app. This isn't the case with external pagefile. Everything works instantly, I don't have to wait.

Have you ever even tried this kind of a configuration, in practice ?

Anyways, now I have another Promise controller with a HD dedicated for paging. It's fast now..

[tazdevl]

Guess what. You haven't used my system. It WAS faster with pagefile on the external firewire HD instead of the same system/boot drive. When I have pf on my system (internal) drive, I have to wait for windows and menus to draw on the screen, after using a memory-hungry app. This isn't the case with external pagefile. Everything works instantly, I don't have to wait.

Have you ever even tried this kind of a configuration, in practice ?

Anyways, now I have another Promise controller with a HD dedicated for paging. It's fast now..

Yes, as I said, I'm a system engineer. I've tried more configurations than you can imagine.

Drive or page file fragmentation could be the cause of your problems, especially if the drive is near capacity.

You could download a trial of Perfectdisk, O&O or Diskeeper, run an offline defrag. Might help and they do increase performance a fair bit over the default XP defragger.

I suggest you run some benches, bet you'll find out there isn't an increase in performance. Many folks try things out and imagine an improvement, but when you get down to it, the benefit is just imagined once you throw some benches into the equation.

Best example is RAID 0. If you think your computer runs faster because of it, you have another thing coming. Plenty of articles out there that clearly show no benefit for home users.

Here's another question for you to ponder. If the benefits are so demonstrable, ever wonder why more people don't utilize this uber setup?

[ggallin]

Here's another question for you to ponder. If the benefits are so demonstrable, ever wonder why more people don't utilize this uber setup?

I find it absolutely possible that many don't realize the benefits of a paging file being on a separate hd controller.