Putting your swap file on a separate hard drive...

[Ronn_Bman]

I've added a second hard drive, and I know there is a benefit from having your swap file on a separate physical drive. My question is that I'm wondering if I'll benefit from installing my games, demos, music, and other frequently changing files on my second drive, too. Should I make a partition on the second drive for the frequently changing files, or just use it as one big file(it is 30gig)?

I guess I'm trying to keep my main drive from becoming fragmented, but is it the same difference on a second drive? Is there really any difference?

[ 06-07-2004, 06:21 PM: Message edited by: Ronn_Bman ]

[Animal]

Not really much of a benefit from installing apps on the second drive since if you reinstall windows, it won't know that the apps are there.

Your music and personal files, for sure put on the second drive.

[Vaskez]

Your windows partition is likely to change a lot due to creation and deletion of temporary files, internet browsing etc. so that will become fragmented. I have my media files on a seperate partition because they change slightly LESS frequently. I also have a seperate partition for apps. Well it's like this:

hard disk 1:
C: Windows 2000
D: Applications

hard disk 2:
G: Games
H: Personal files
I: Media
J: Windows 2000 swap file
K: DOS
J: Windows 98

There is a good reason for having your swap file on a separate hard disk: the slowest part in hard disk reading is moving the reading heads. So if the swap's on a seperate hard disk, the heads aren't continually moved between the place on the disk where your apps data is and where your swap data is since on disk 1 could be your apps and disk 2 could be your swap so both can be read at once.

Another trick as stated, is to put the swap file at the start of a disk since reading there is the quickest for some reason I don't quite know

Anyway, the point of partitioning is that you can keep groups of files that change with the same regularity on the same position and so you can defrag each partition seperately. It also helps organisation. So have your swap file on its own partition at the start of the 2nd hard disk for best performance

[ 06-07-2004, 07:21 PM: Message edited by: Vaskez ]

[Ronn_Bman]

This is kind of what I was thinking; I need my OS and Apps on a separate physical drive from the swap file so the head isn't constantly switching back and forth between App/OS and the swap file.

Vas, how do you get the swap file at the front of the drive? When I had a smaller second drive it automatically put the swap in the middle of the drive and nothing could move it. I notice your swap 'drive' is not the first drive (letter-wise at least) on the second partitioned drive, so is that the section nearest the beginning of the physical drive?

Also, I had a very small second drive for my swap file last time, and I tried to partition it so the swap file 'drive' was the size of the swap file, but every time I booted it complained that the drive was full. It still complained with the drive 1.5 X the size.

[Vaskez]

Yeah I've done a bit of experimentation and it also didn't like me setting my partition size to the same size as the swap file. The drive letters are assigned like that only because that is the order in which the partitions were set up. If you use something like PartitionMagic then you can tell it where on the disk to put the parititions and you can put the swap one at the start.

[Animal]

Format the drive, and before you do anything else to it, set up a FIXED swap file on it. This will keep it at the front of the partition. If you want to see any kind of performance gain, albeit minimal, make sure the drive with the swap file is on a different IDE controller than the drive with your OS.

[ 06-07-2004, 11:37 PM: Message edited by: Animal ]

[Dedzy]

What Animal said, if you have the 2 drives on the same ribbon, you're not maximizing performance.

[Ronn_Bman]

Now that I didn't know.

Thanks Guys!