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Thread: Suggest me the best drive to have pagefile on

  1. #1
    Join Date
    Dec 2009
    Posts
    27

    Suggest me the best drive to have pagefile on

    Hey guys i have a Windows Vista 32-bit supported machine. It has 4 GB RAM on it. Anyways i have a few choices n terms of hard drives and was wondering which is the best drive to put the Vista pagefile on. I have a 160GB Maxtor Windows drive SATA. I also have a 500 GB slave Western Digital SATA drive. As soon as i am able to pay for it, I'll upgrade to a Windows Vista 64 bit version. this of course depends on the fact whether everything supports it or not. I am also open to upgrading to a Windows 7 64 bit version provided the hardware requirements are met. So i am wondering as to which hard drive should i have the page file on.

  2. #2
    Join Date
    May 2008
    Posts
    4,085

    Re: Suggest me the best drive to have pagefile on

    Well you are the only one who knows about the performance criteria here regarding the hard drives. If both hard drives offer similar performance then it is best to put it on a non system drive in my opinion. This is what i have read in a few articles. The basic reason is that if you have a heavy page file usage then it is putting pressure on your backup drive and not your system drive. Your system drive might be busy doing something else which is why it should not be affected by heavy page file usage.

  3. #3
    Join Date
    Apr 2008
    Posts
    3,267

    Re: Suggest me the best drive to have pagefile on

    Well let me have you know that what the task manager calls the page file usage is not actually that. If you are taking a decision based on that, be warned then. What it actually represents is the system commit charge, that is the total number of pages committed in total. so basically it represents potential page file usage and not actual usage. The non system suggestion is a good one but the difference is hardly noticeable to the untrained eye. The page file is rarely used to any noticeable extent actually. I have a Western Digital with a 16 MB cache so i use that, if you have the same configuration then go for WD.

  4. #4
    Join Date
    Apr 2008
    Posts
    3,522

    Re: Suggest me the best drive to have pagefile on

    Well the cache memory available for both drives would be a big criteria while selecting the drive. You can't just tell which to use depending upon the brand of the hard drive. Both are reputed companies but on brand value i would go for Western Digital simply because i have a good experience with it. The only negative effect of not having a page file on the system or boot partition would be that you won't be able to save the memory dumps if you get the blue screen issue. It might not be a big deal but it is worth keeping in mind that it is possible.

  5. #5
    Join Date
    Apr 2008
    Posts
    3,295

    Re: Suggest me the best drive to have pagefile on

    I would suggest you to put it on the fastest hard drive you can find amongst the two. According to me the actual use of page file is for Hibernation. That is something done by sequential access in my opinion. Nowadays in my opinion systems have enough RAM so this isn't actually needed. You could also try disabling it instead of keeping it on considering it is not even noticeable really. Store it on an uncompressed partition because a lot of resources are used in compression and decompression. You need the fastest access time in this situation, keep that in mind.

  6. #6
    Join Date
    Nov 2005
    Posts
    3,026

    Re: Suggest me the best drive to have pagefile on

    Well i had put my page file on a solid state drive once and i found out it is completely useless. If the page file is actually being used so that it influences the performance, then the performance of your system will be as good as a Pentium 1 anyways. The page file is just a last ditch solution for having very little RAM. You should also put it somewhere where the drive isn't vulnerable. Keep this in mind while selecting one of the drives for your purpose. Good luck, hope this helps.

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