pagefile on usb drive faster?

Would putting my pagefile on a USB external drive improve performance? Would Putting it on a thumb drive be better than a full-blown external hard drive?

As it stands, I have 2 gigs of ram on a windows xp64 machine, so i barely use the pagefile anyway. It's just that, you know, every little bit out of your machine, right?

 

You can adjust your pagefile to optimize space. I have increased to 4Gb Ram and all but totally eliminated the pagefile completely.

The system flies.

 

i have 3 Gb with xp and no pagefile. it is smooth as silk. much less hard drive grinding. especially with indexing disabled as well! running on a USB is a good question, wonder if anyone has done that...

 

I've always wondered about pagefile. I have 2 GB of RAM and would like to eliminate the pagefile, mainly to reduce harddrive activity.

Is it safe to disable pagefile?

 

Disabling the page file is a bad idea, that much I know for sure. More info here.

 

I have attached a picture of my final settings. It saves me 3 plus GB of space. What I would suggest is to go into

system/advanced system settings/settings/ advanced/change and gradually reduce the size until you notice that your system may be slowing if you have less RAM.

With 4Gb, I can prob eliminate it less but I am comfortable with custom size at 600/1200Mb. See attached.

EDIT... I understand that I am using Vista which is different but the process is similar. I believe you get to virtual addressing through device manager in XP if I remember correctly.

 

Putting the pagefile on a USB drive would slow things down dramatically. Contrary to popular belief, flash drives are almost always slower than real hard drives because of the way data is written to them. Reading can be faster, but over USB it doesn't really make a difference. Also, USB drives are considered removable, and I doubt Windows would allow you to put it there anyway.

I also want to reiterate that disabling the pagefile is a BAD THING TO DO. Do not disable the page file. You may think you're smarter and do it anyway, but you're not. The best thing to do is not touch the pagefile settings at all and let Windows automatically manage it.

 

Easy there killer. I was just looking for an informative answer.

Anyway, I see that flamenko has altered his pagefile, as he has 4 GB.

Does reducing the pagefile improve performance? Not disabling it, only reducing it, as flameko has shown us.

 

For me its not really a fair answer as I have an ssd but...

Typically, my system is only using 1400MB of ram so reducing the page file and forcing it into ram works great.

Having less ram and trying this might slow it so I would be cautious and do it abit at a time.

 

Notes - However you can enhance performance by putting the paging file on a different partition and on a different physical hard disk drive. That way, Windows can handle multiple I/O requests more quickly. When the paging file is on the boot partition, Windows must perform disk reading and writing requests on both the system folder and the paging file. When the paging file is moved to a different partition and a different physical hard disk drive, there is less competition between reading and writing requests."

From that XP Myth link

 

I have 4GB of ram in my notebook and I've disabled the page file for 3 months now and so far no problems. I can run all the games I play just fine.

 

Making the pagefile smaller will have no impact on performance, except you will gain a little disk space -- until your system runs out of memory and crashes.

You are hampering yourself because you have tons of crap loaded into real, expensive memory that should be living on the page file (this applies to EVERY program, I'm not talking about crapware here). So you're using up a lot of RAM for that junk instead of letting Vista use it for more important things, like disk caching and superfetch.

 

Some programs rely on page file and will crash if run without any.

 

Haven't come across any on my EEE...

Then again I'm not bothering disabling them on either my notebooks or my computers. How do you move the paging files, cause everytime I try it just makes a new on my main drive. Trying to put it on my SDHC card on my Eee PC.

 

I got that, I wanted to try and move it to the SDHC card to see if I notice any performance. I did notice a drop when I first disabled it, but when I got my new RAM (2GB) there was a huge pick up again.

 

"if you have XP and 2Gb or more of ram, you can probably eliminate the pagefile with no problems." No, you can't.

Your understanding of how pagefiles work and how hard disks wear out are, in the first case incomplete, and in the second case grossly misinformed.

I'm not going to explain the reason pagefiles exist, do a google search, wikipedia, etc... and spend the next few hours learning to understand the intricacies of virtual memory (which is not the same as a page file), and how the whole memory system works. All I can say here is you have an incomplete picture about how it works, which is leading you to incorrect assumptions.

As for "wearing out your hard drive", I want to LOL, but I won't. Hard disks do not wear out because of extra activity caused by something like the page file. The reads/writes of the pagefile are a drop in the bucket compared to everything else that is going on in the system. Reading/writing does not wear out the magnetic media in any significant way, nor does seeking the heads around the platter. The ONLY thing that affects hard disk life is the spinning platter. What usually fails there is the bearings, but with the advent of fluid bearings, they run cooler and don't wear out nearly as much as the old bearings did. Heat and manufacturing defects are really the only things that cause physical disk problems.

 

HDD do wear out, it just takes forever and won't happen in your computers life cycle. As for SSD like in my EeePC thats a whole other matter. And I would like to preserve the pagefile if I could, just not on my EeePC internal SSD.

 

What evidence do you have that pagefiles or even disk use in general in any way contributes to the failure rate of the drives? I don't think you will find ANY such evidence even if you pour through all the info from the drive manufacturers themselves. This disk use issue is a red herring.

I have a server that is now over 12 years old. It has seven hard drives in it that have run 24 hours a day for all 12 years. Constant use has not caused them to fail.

Gary

 

EVERYTHING wears out over a long enough timeline. "won't happen in your computers life cycle" is effectively "it won't wear out".

You're free to do whatever you want. You can drive with no seat belt or run with scissors. You'll be able to do it no problem until the day that you won't, then you'll see where the problems lie. I hope you never post any messages about how unstable Vista is or how much it crashes, because you've forfeited your rights to complain about it by disabling one of the fundamental systems that makes the system work correctly.

 

000111 is right. Moving parts = wear. Albeit, it won't happen in a given lifetime of a normal computer, but it's there.

Whether pagefile is to blame, I'm not well versed in the Virtual Memory/Pagefile aspect of an OS. Hence, me asking my original question earlier.

orev, it seems you're very knowledgeable in this aspect. Maybe you could shed some light on this growing myth? I for one am very interested.

 

I never said there was NO impact. I said it is minimal.

And where do you think this friction occurs? Two places... the spindle bearing and the fulcrum point for the head arm. What percentage of hard drive failures are related to either of those two bearings? And of those ONLY the head arm bearing is affected by use. Nothing else in the hard drive is affected by use at all. So unless the drives are succumbing to head arm bearing failures, the equation of more use = more failures is not true.

Gary

 

Hmm. That's interesting. I never thought of that.

Well, why don't we all just get SSDs to eliminate mechanical wear all together?

Then everyone can be happy!

 

Notice no one has said hard drives NEVER wear out, but the impact caused by pagefile isn't the cause of drive failures. Sure, they wear out due to use, but it takes more time then you may think.

 

more time than i might think... maybe matt, maybe. tell that to someone whose hard drive blew up! extending the life of my hard drive is a good thing. whether i get to notice that life span extension is another matter. hard drives fail and it's a pain. if i can do something to extend the life of my hd, i'll do it. oh, and that is aside from all the other benefits...

 

Ok, then what parts of a disk drive are affected by having the pagefile versus not having it? The electronics are all going to be on, regardless of the state of a pagefile. So that eliminates them. That leaves the spindle and the drive arm, right?

Gary

 

This is trolling, you little crack monkey this is pointless now.We are arguing the two sides of the same coin. You said they don't in the post that started this mess (I highly doubt that a HDD will last 12 years running 24/7, my opinion). Now would someone say how the hell you moved the pagefile or am I gonna have to get medieval on your ars.

 

How do you KNOW that what you are doing is extending the life of the drive? You are making a big assumption. An assumption that is not mirrored by the data from the manufacturers.

It seems you know more than they do about disk drives, like you know more about the need for pagefiles than the folks who wrote the OS.

Gary

 

ranger-
try this to move the pagefile-

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/307886
woot!

 

Doubt it if you wish. I have the server sitting right here. It has seven SCSI drives in it. The only time they ever spin down is when the power fails longer than the battery backup on the box. It runs a half dozen databases and my SourceSafe instance. It is so old that the processors in it are 4 Pentium Pro's running at 300 megahertz. The machine is from 1995-1996. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pentium_Pro

I had to replace two of the processors over the life of the machine and the CD-ROM drive.

For moving the page file. You go into the Vitrual Memory settings and create a page file on another drive. Then select NO PAGE file on the primary drive. Then reboot.

Gary

 

Thank you, man has it been that long since the Pentium Pro...

 

woah nelly, I leave for work, come back, and my little thread has a little trolling goin on . Everything That I have read suggests that removing the page file is, as has been said, a bad idea. Whether that is true or not, ill let you guys fight over .

So, if i put it on my external USB hard DRIVE (not flash) will that increase performance? Or onto a X120 SD card? XP 64bit (aka xp 2003) allows me to put a page file onto an external drive.

Please, someone give me a definitive answer; please don't debate the usefulness/uselessness of the page file. I wasn't asking that.

 

^^....That's what I've been wondering as well....^^

 

my personal definitive input:
. for laptop with ONE drive: do not put ur pagefile on the flashcard or usb memory stick or external usb drive, it could possibly (more likely) drag ur performance down
. for laptop with 2 drives (not partitions): put the pagefile on the non-os drive

personal note: if u have plenty of disk spaces:
. delete the pagefile,
. defrag,
. reactivate the pagefile

cheers ...

 

Why? With plenty of RAM the page file is rarely accessed and the amount accessed should be minimal, smaller than the transfer rate. And you can eliminate the seek time.

 

I wish someone had a definitive answer, and not just an opinion.

What are the positive aspects of reducing pagefile? What are the negative aspects? Perhaps examples of both?

With 2 GB of RAM or more, what is a "safe" reduction for the pagefile, if any at all?

 

1. reducing pagefile = more HD space = advantage
2. with 2 GBs of ram with XP or Vista, you are free to disable the pagefile altogether
3. caveat : some apps do want a pagefile. for this reason i keep a very small pagefile of 256 MBs just to keep apps like this happy.
4. there is no real danger to eliminating the pagefile; i.e., you won't fatally harm your system. if you ever do run out of RAM, your system will get unworkably slow, but no danger. another possibility is that your app or system may crash if the app wants a pagefile and one doesn't exist.
5. i run Vista Ultimate with 2 GBs of ram and have never seen more than 55% used even under heavy use.

 

So far that's been the best post in this thread.

Thank you very much.
+rep.

 

u were joking or kidding urself, right? u asked for definitive answer, and so far, all posts are "definitive" opinions based on personal experiences. u picked the one that satisfied ur tendency of belief. let us hear from ur own definitive answer

@jimc: i was responding to OP, NO discussion of "benefits" of having or not having a pagefile - can't really get away from "side"swiping posts

cheers ...

 

the only thing based on "personal experience" i posted was #5. how does "no pagefile = more HD space = advantage" become something based on my personal experience. it's a fact.

don't be jealous

 

the last part of ur equation is still debatable, unless u can really be sure about it, and not BASING on ur personal experience on ur comp, the "advantage" is just plain hearsay (on ur own), might be good on ur environment, proven to be bad on many others -- got nothing to do with jealousy. I accept GOOD /PROVEN system performance tweak, not personal statistic!

cheers ...

 

There is a leap of faith going from:

"no pagefile = more HD space" and "more hd space = advantage"

to say

"no page file = advantage".

Seriously, is 2 or even 4 gb a REAL advantage?

I am always amazed at folks who assume they know better than the developers of the operating system.

To me the definitive answer is to leave the setting at "system managed" and allow the algorithms built into the OS to do what they are designed to do.

Gary

RE: putting it in a USB drive. I would ONLY do this if the USB drives transfer rate was equal to or faster than my hard drive. I do move my page file from my main partition, but only so that my image files of that partition are 2 gb smaller.

 

oh, man. i hate to even get into this pool again...

maybe one of the advantages of your pagefile on another drive (of whatever type) is that you will be able to have I/O for your C: drive and that drive at the same time, resulting in better performance.

i do not know this as a fact so if someone could help a brother out and confirm/burn this idea, fire away!

 

I'm asking for a definitive answer because as I said in an earlier post that I don't know much about the pagefile and how it works.

I mean, that is why I and the OP asked, because we don't know ourselves.

That's what this forum is for, right? Or am I missing something ghn?

 

Then for saftey, why don't you just safely reduce it a bit at a time and leave it where it is. I didn't eliminate pagefile because I didn't want to chance anything. I did reduce it significantly (600/1200Mb). I gained space but there is no visible performance increase to me. There may be though because I believe, with the reduction, I am forcing more into the 4Gb RAM I have so..overall maybe i have created a better performing system.

Safety first!

 

Most definitely!

 

This is correct, it does help. There is only one drawback (and I have this same drawback when I moved my page file to another partiton on the drive), if there is no pagefile on the C: partition, Windows (2000, XP or Vista) is unable to create a memory dumpfile if an error occurs. No big loss unless you are debugging.

Gary

 

What I did on XP, and Vista ,which I only used for 3 month before switching back to XP, is to set 50 Mb on C drive and the rest of the page file on another physical drive this allows some legacy program/windows to have space to "breath" when they need it (50 Mb on C . It works very well, and my XP performance seems to have increase slightly but noticeable. For Vista the gain by doing the above however doesn't seem to be beneficial in any way.