Re-locate paging file

davolente · Joined: Oct 04, 2003 Posts: 304 Location: Kent, UK

A common recommended tweak is to put the paging file on a drive away from system drive C, which is what I thought I'd done but also left a small paging file (recommended by some, including an MS man - and he should know - hopefully) on the C drive. Got everything set to show hidden and system files. HOWEVER, when I looked at the drive that was supposed to have the main paging file (pagefile.sys) on it , no sign of it............ Huh?
Also read that it speeds things up if the file can be spread over several drives, SO, as several drives is what I have, did the business with the advanced settings, set, applied, re-booted and, according to that, it looks OK with a bit of page file on every drive (except C in this instance, by design). Once again, though, out of the four extra drives, on opening, I have only one drive that has a pagefile.sys on it. I have a search program called "Everything", that literally indexes everything, including system files and that too, on a "pagefile.sys" search, only shows the pagefile.sys as being on the one drive. ("Drive letter "H" in my case). Don't understand what's going on, especially as I've done the same thing on an old machine with two extra drives and they both have pagefile.sys files on them and it has made it perkier without a doubt.. What's so different on the main machine, I ask myself? Compared properties, etc and can't see any difference. Odd. Seems I have only one extra drive that will accept the paging file, despite the advanced properties showing that the deed is done. Have I missed something?

pasquanel · Joined: Jun 20, 2005 Posts: 507 Location: Maine

I have used this tweak for years now and have created a small partition just for the page files on a separate drive. The only time they are visible is when I run my defrag program (diskeeper) Confused

davolente · Joined: Oct 04, 2003 Posts: 304 Location: Kent, UK

Thanks for the hint. I would also mention that, even though the advanced virtual memory properties show a page file on all drives, the "total paging size for all drives" is only what is on the "H" drive, which is what makes me assume that the "H" drive is the only one that will accept a paging file - but why?

goretsky · Posted: Fri May 01, 2009 2:32 am Post subject:

Hello,

Which version of Microsoft Windows are you running?

Try removing all of the paging files, restarting the computer and then re-creating one paging file on the disk volume with the highest drive letter. You may need to restart after you do this for the change to take effect, depending upon which version of Windows you are running.

When the computer comes back up, what is the size and location of the paging file(s) on it?

Regards,

Aryeh Goretsky

davolente · Joined: Oct 04, 2003 Posts: 304 Location: Kent, UK

Sorry - should have said. Running XP, as ever! I will try suggestions out over the weekend, hopefully. Thanks.

davolente · Joined: Oct 04, 2003 Posts: 304 Location: Kent, UK

Just had a Eureka moment. Realised that the drives that don't seem to like accepting a paging file are my external USB drives (I was fooled slightly after re-shuffling drive letters after connecting other devices) and, after Googling around, it looks like XP doesn't allow for a paging file to be put on an external drive. Seems that the Virtual Memory Manager doesn't know this. It shows all the drives and there is no error message to tell you it can't be done. It shows everything OK after allocating, apart from the total being wrong and just showing paging file size for the one extra internal drive. (assuming the "C" drive isn't used for paging). If this is the case, it begs the question as what folk were using when the suggestion was made to split the paging file up over several drives, allegedly putting a tad more speed on.

BudDurland · Joined: Dec 05, 2002 Posts: 475

Compared to an internal drive, the performance of an external USB or FireWire drive is *horrible*. You're probably better off to not put a swap file on there at all.

pasquanel · Joined: Jun 20, 2005 Posts: 507 Location: Maine

This has worked well for me, leave about 50 megs on your C: drive for paging files, create a small partition on another drive (about twice the size of your desired paging files) and your good to go.

Ditto on what BudDurland said in reguard to the USB external drive that would be self defeating!

davolente · Joined: Oct 04, 2003 Posts: 304 Location: Kent, UK

Thanks all. Not sure whether the original article author was that knowledgable or whether he was just theorising. The item said "stripe the page file over several drives - the more, the merrier" for better perfomance but, as everyone has kindly said, USB external ones don't cut the mustard, assuming it could be done, anyway, which doesn't seem to be the case, judging from my experiments.

drwho07 · Joined: Nov 29, 2007 Posts: 1546 Location: Central FL, USA

As smart as some "experts" may seem, I always figured that the engineers at MS that wrote Windows XP were just a little bit smarter.

Therefore, I just leave the old pagefile alone and let Windows manage it.
So far, I've never been sorry for doing that.

There are SO MANY other things you can do to greatly improve your system (OS) performance without futzing with the pagefile, that it's hardly worth the effort.
I have a whole list of tweaks that I perform on an XP PC to greatly improve system performance, up to 100%.

Some of the "NO-NO's" that I see every day, include:
trying to run XP with less than a gig of ram, Twisted Evil

allowing temp files, etc. to build up on the HD, like forever, Crying or Very sad

never doing a "Disk Cleanup" or "Defrag" on the HD, Crying or Very sad

never burning doc's and pictures to DVD's for permanent storage,
running XP with never a HD backup, and System Restore turned off.

Unfortunately, most of the PC's in the world fall into the above category.
I can double the performance of the average PC, and I NEVER mess with the
pagefile.

Cheers Mates!
The Doctor Cool

goretsky · Posted: Mon May 04, 2009 2:54 am Post subject:

Hello,

The reason the virtual memory paging swap file needs to be on an internal hard disk drive is because if the external drive were disconnected the computer would lose access to the part of its memory paged to the swap file.

I am currently on a two hard disk drive configuration in my primary desktop computer, but even on a single drive configuration, I would create a separate disk volume and place a static swap file on it, equivalent to 1.5X (or 1.0X) the amount of installed memory. In a single drive environment, this did not result in any noticeable performance improvement for me, but it did result in a smaller amount of on the disk volume containing the operating system.

Regards,

Aryeh Goretsky