Pagefile questions

[monoman]

I want to put my pagefile on a second drive but before doing so i have a couple of questions.

(1) My second drive also has xp installed on it. Would it's own pagefile be overwritten? Should I create another partition on the second drive (say 4gb) for the pagefile

(2) I've heard that i should still keep a small page file of 50mb on my C drive but if I go here http://support.microsoft.com/kb/307886 it says I should keep a page file equal to my RAM - which is 1.5gb. Does this not defeat the object of moving the pagefile?

Cheers

[monoman]

Ok, i've answered my second question. From here - http://support.microsoft.com/kb/314482/

If i have a large page file on the root drive and another an a dedicated page file drive, xp will use the partition on the less used drive.

[The Sopwith Turtle]

There is a significant speed-up when you put the page file on a second drive, but you need to watch out for a rather ridiculous problem - the two hard drives need to be on different IDE channels. If one is a master and the other is a slave on the same channel, you will actually be slowing things down.

[monoman]

Yes i'd read about that. Both my hard drives are Masters. One is a SATA and one an IDE (I think. It's not SATA anyway).

[This Guy]

There is a significant speed-up when you put the page file on a second drive, but you need to watch out for a rather ridiculous problem - the two hard drives need to be on different IDE channels. If one is a master and the other is a slave on the same channel, you will actually be slowing things down.

Interesting! I had not heard that.

As I understand it this would not apply to SATA drives, since they are all independent? Still sorting this SATA stuff out myself. I do know there are no master/slave settings/jumpers on the drives, but not positive a master slave relationship isn't made by the controller. Don't think so though.

[Stupendous Man]

I don`t think you have to worry about it interfering with XP. The pagefile doesn`t store anything important permanently. Once you power off, anything in the pagefile is useless. When you power on again, the pagefile is refreshed and becomes active again for that new session.

[Blight]

And with a registry tweak, you can use a different file name for the page file, so there won't be a conflict of file names (although even with the conflict, i'm not sure it will have any impact as stup man suggested, the file doesn't hold any important data after shutdown).

[kevin]

the recommendation for a pagefile equal to memory on the boot partition is so that when the computer bluescreens a memory dump can be written to that pagefile. Then for debugging Microsoft may ask for that file.

This is more important for servers than client machines (when was the last time you talked to microsoft about a bluescreen issue?)

[Blue Bubble]

the recommendation for a pagefile equal to memory on the boot partition is so that when the computer bluescreens a memory dump can be written to that pagefile. Then for debugging Microsoft may ask for that file.

This is more important for servers than client machines (when was the last time you talked to microsoft about a bluescreen issue?)

I don't know much about the internals of Windows, but isn't the OS capable of generating a "compressed" dump, or even "selective" dump ? Even in Windows, there's bound to be a lot of zeroed pages that don't need to occupy space in a dumpfile. Also, how does Windows know not to use the pagefile after a restart if it's got a dump in it ? Or does it know, and copy the dump elsewhere after the restart ?

P.s. I do crash dump analysis (amongst other stuff) for VMS and Tru64 for a living.