Where to put swap files

would it be faster for me to have a swap file on the same harddrive the os is on? or would it be faster for the swap file to be on a different harddrive?

In theory, different. Spreading the activity amongst a greater number of hard disks will always be faster (RAID striping theory, check out Vinum). Well, until breaking it up and reassembling takes more time that actually writing, but cpu time is a ton cheaper than i/o, and i/o busses generally have a lot of free overhead, too.

but what if the drive that the OS is installed on is 7200rpm, and the one that has swap is 5400rpm

A track star and a computer programmer are having a footrace to see who can traverse a hill the quickest. The former runs uphill and the latter down. Who's faster? Who knows, have to time them and see.

Well heres how to setup your swap files, go to system properties (right-click My Computer, select properties, then click the performance tab, from there you click the "Virtual Memory" button and a window pops up. On the window for virtual memory select the box where it says "Let Me Specify My Own Virtual Memory Settings", then put this on your fastest harddrive in terms of access speed or by speed in rpm. Set the minimum and maximum size swap file to 2x or 2.5x the size of your physical memory, such as, if you got 128 MB of Physical Memory, set the swap file size to be 256 MB or 320 MB.

Actually, operating system and program executables are rarely what eats all the memory, it's their data. If you're doing lots of a/v editing and have a separate drive for that, keeping it off that drive will probably be your best bet. If you're playing lots of video games (like CS or Diablo...ugh) their data is normally kept in the same directory as their executables, so keeping swap off your program files drive would be best. Like everything else, the clean-cut answer is always "it depends".

yes i kno how to set up my swap file=for windows. thats why i was asking if it would be faster to be on a seperate drive that is at 5400rpm.

when you are talking about milliseconds, I doubt you will see much difference. Back in the days of 386s and 4 megs of memory and 200mb hard drives it mattered. not too much anymore.

robert

ok thanks then, i might remove the extra 2 hdds i have to reduce the noise in my machine. i dont feel like playing around with dual booting and such anymore.

>> when you are talking about milliseconds, I doubt you will see much difference. Back in the days of 386s and 4 megs of memory and 200mb hard drives it mattered. not too much anymore.


But that's a lot of milliseconds. When you do the math between 5400 and 7200, that's a 25% speed increase.

I can absolutely see the difference running Windows 2000. My 5400 RPM drive is aggravatingly slow compared to my 7200.

-Paul

The spindle speed is mostly dealing with seek time. The operating system itself (and some large programs) have many many small files and seeking to each of them can add up to noticable time (as you've seen), especially during boot up. For random reads, a faster spindle speed will make big difference, but for sequential ones, it doesn't really (unless your sequential files are highly fragmented, then it's not really sequential, is it?). I'd say most "normal" conditions tend to be pretty random.

A slower spindle speed doesn't neccessarily mean slower transfer rates, but they tend to be cheaper, cooler, and queter.These days, 7200 rpm drives are pretty cheap and some are pretty quiet, too, so there's little reason not to use them. If you want a dirt cheap drive to store your 250G of britney mp3's and anime pr0n, getting a 5400 rpm with a 2M buffer can save some money without affecting the desired performance.