Game play! with swap file on another drive

...is this still useful or really does not make a difference? Yes, I've read some post about sawapfile but have not seen one on this very particular subject matter. No need to go through tons of explainations. Just tell me yes, it will make some difference or no, it will not make any difference. Thank you.

 

On another partition, or another HDD ?

 

Another drive with a partition. I have two seperate HDD. C & D drives. The D drive is partitioned. I only store a few files on it. In fact the Vista recovery file is stored on the partitioned part of the HDD.

 

No, it will not make any difference in performance....

 

Thank you Andy.

 

One thing that does make a difference is having the games installed on a completely different drive to the OS though. Means game files can be accessed independently without any waiting for OS/background files. It can increase framerates marginally but mainly it stops the jerking due to HDD access.

 

Thanks. Then I will install games application on the D HDD instead. Thanks for the tip.

 

I've heard that it makes a difference where your swapfile is but it's very small these days, due to the increased amount of RAM that notebooks gave. What would make a bigger difference would be using a solid state drive for the swapfile or, more importantly, tweaking your registry so that the swapfile is used as a last resort (check NBR's optimization guide in the windows forum, I think) if you have 2GB+ of ram (as ram will be used first, and most programs won't even need a swapfile to work from in addition to the ram). Setting your swap file to a constant number also helps (i.e. not letting windows change the size of the swap file - set to 1.5X-2X your amount of ram).

 

Ok, So putting my swapfile on a completely seperate drive is a positive thing? Well, I have 2gigs of RAM so, If I put the swapfile on a compeltely seperate drive I would not need to set the Swapfile to a constant figure, right?

 

According to this article the answer to your initial question is yes.
"Spreading paging files across multiple disk drives and controllers improves performance on most modern disk systems because multiple disks can process input/output (I/O) requests concurrently in a round-robin fashion."

I also recomment installing diskeeper for optimum disk (and swapfile) speeds. The builtin Windows defragmenter is crap compared to this excellent program.

 

The answer to your question is yes. But it sounds like its on the same hard drive so in your case.... No. It has to be two separate HDs not just two portions on the same drive. If you have to HDs then, as AndrewM said, install it on the drive that your OS is not installed on.