Moving PageFile

If I move my pagefile on my dual boot ,win98se-win200pro, to a different
partition on the same drive to save drive space on the Win2000pro partition,
will it slow things down or speed things up.
My 120GB HDD is divided into 8 partitions.
Only the I partition (Win2000Pro) is in NTFS format. The other 7 are in
Fat32.
Is it OK to move the Win2000Pro Page File to a different partiton that is
Fat32?
Any comments?
Thanks,
Buffalo

 

You probably won't notice a difference. Make sure the system account (NT
Authority) has Full Control permissions for the drive.


--

Regards,

Dave Patrick ....Please no email replies - reply in newsgroup.
Microsoft Certified Professional
Microsoft MVP [Windows]



"Buffalo" wrote:<!--coloro:blue--><span style="color:blue <!--/coloro-->
> If I move my pagefile on my dual boot ,win98se-win200pro, to a different
> partition on the same drive to save drive space on the Win2000pro
> partition,
> will it slow things down or speed things up.
> My 120GB HDD is divided into 8 partitions.
> Only the I partition (Win2000Pro) is in NTFS format. The other 7 are in
> Fat32.
> Is it OK to move the Win2000Pro Page File to a different partiton that is
> Fat32?
> Any comments?
> Thanks,
> Buffalo
>
> <!--colorc--><!--/colorc-->

 

Most of my partitions are fat32. A few are ntfs. The page file doesn't care,
and I've never noticed a performance difference.

In theory, you should put the page file on a partition closest to the
partion that will receive the most file i/o, or just closest to the system
partition. In the real world, you will probalby never notice the difference.
If your page file is getting hammered, your performance is going to drag no
matter how efficient it is.

"Buffalo" <Eric@nada.com.invalid> wrote in message
news:har67j$div$1@news.eternal-september.org...<!--coloro:blue--><span style="color:blue <!--/coloro-->
> If I move my pagefile on my dual boot ,win98se-win200pro, to a different
> partition on the same drive to save drive space on the Win2000pro
> partition,
> will it slow things down or speed things up.
> My 120GB HDD is divided into 8 partitions.
> Only the I partition (Win2000Pro) is in NTFS format. The other 7 are in
> Fat32.
> Is it OK to move the Win2000Pro Page File to a different partiton that is
> Fat32?
> Any comments?
> Thanks,
> Buffalo
>
> <!--colorc--><!--/colorc-->

 

Dave Patrick wrote:<!--coloro:blue--><span style="color:blue <!--/coloro-->
> You probably won't notice a difference. Make sure the system account
> (NT Authority) has Full Control permissions for the drive.
>
><!--colorc--><!--/colorc-->
Thanks for the info.
I was just running a little low on free space on my Win2000Pro partition.
Buffalo

 

Zootal wrote:<!--coloro:blue--><span style="color:blue <!--/coloro-->
> Most of my partitions are fat32. A few are ntfs. The page file
> doesn't care, and I've never noticed a performance difference.
>
> In theory, you should put the page file on a partition closest to the
> partion that will receive the most file i/o, or just closest to the
> system partition. In the real world, you will probalby never notice
> the difference. If your page file is getting hammered, your
> performance is going to drag no matter how efficient it is.<!--colorc--><!--/colorc-->

Thanks for your response.
My pagefile isn't used very much at all.
I think my max pagefile use is around 250MB and I usually have around 500MB
of free physical ram.
Buffalo

 

Robert Carnegie rja.carnegie@excite.com

My recipe is an approximately 15 gigabytes Windows XP system and applications partition, NTFS, plus 10 gigabytes FAT32 partition containing a 4 gigabytes fixed size page file. And then another NTFS partition for the rest of the disk - for a one-disk system.

This is so that I can use a Linux product such as SystemRescueCD 1.3.1 to snapshot the entire system partition into a set of 650 MB compressed files on the FAT32 partition - the "partimage" tool also collects the primary partition-table - and then copy those files to any suitable removable storage. I am choosing not to back up the page file itself because it's unusual to want its actual contents back, and, as I said, it's going to be 4 gigabytes. I'm a late convert to SystemRescueCD and I may actually be using partimage in Knoppix instead, try both or get it separately.

Is 4 gigabytes too large? It's probably unnecessarily large. Technical advice on the topic is extremely vague, but I think the position is that any one application on your computer can demand x gigabytes for its own use, where x is given as 2, 3, or 4 depending on who you ask - so 10 greedy programs could demand 20 gigabytes - but that's an unlikely scenario. (If you hit it, I think you can put a larger page file on partition three WITHOUT changing the one on partition two.)

Rules of thumb recommended sizes go like 1, 1.5, or 2 times your RAM. Eventually it isn't helpful.

I calculate that the dollar cost of 4 gigabytes page file disk space without fragmentation - 10 gigabytes with the backup provision - is worth it for the benefit of secure operation - and the time I'm not spending any more on researching the "best" swap file size.

If you use hibernate (shut down with option to resume, but really switched off, different from stand by) then hiberfil.sys equal in size to your total (? or used) RAM will always be created on the system partition - at least in XP. This is likely to be wastefully included in your next backup as well, but you can delete it. Windows will just create a new one when you hibernate again. (Please check these statements with someone else.)

I expect Linux access to FAT32 to be more reliable than NTFS, but I'm trusting Linux to back up the system partition... Only the actual files and filesystem metadata will be backed up, so it's important that your backup software understands those structures. I haven't been able to find a "raw" mode that I thought "partimage" used to have, in which merely the whole disk surface is copied, used and unused. This removes a dependency on correct analysis of NTFS, but is liable to be large. That can be addressed by using a product to store empty data such as "0000000000000000" to all the unused space on the disk - it might be useful to do the same to the page and hibernate files, but I assume they each contain something besides the mere data bytes, and it would be bad to do that to them. Anyway, as I say, you can delete the hibernate file. When the "0000“" are compressed in the backup process they will come to nearly nothing. You also can remove the page file, clean and then raw-backup your disk, and then recreate the page file.

 

4 gig page file is rather large isn't it?

Other than that it looks like a good recipe for an install.