cache to a different drive?

[milkman4_hi_r]

i heard you could cache or page file to a seperate hdd and it would improve performance, is this true? if so how do you get it setup? thanx

[Floppyman]

Are you referring to the windows swap file? If so, I have heard of people putting that on a separate drive. I think the idea was that it won't get as fragmented over time. I could be wrong though, and please someone correct me if I am. HTH

[Panama Red]

It's an optimizing tweak that works in XP and 2000. Here's a link to the MS explanation on the how and why. I use it and it works great for me. Others have disputed the effectiveness, but their opinions seem theory based. I tried running my 1Gb of memory system with page file set to "none", but experienced some strange program faults.

http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;314482&Product=winxp

[glc]

I use Win2000 - and I created a fixed size pagefile on the boot partition, using the recommended size for both minimum and maximum. I then used Diskeeper Pro's boot time defragmenter to defragment it once. Zero maintenance pagefile, it will never fragment again becuse it never changes size. With 768mb ram, the recommended size was 1150mb.

[fudtone]

Im not sure how much performance is gained by the various ways to do this.

I do it like Linux:

make a partition 700mg or so for the swap file first (fast part of drive)

Make another about 1.5 for the OS and a few applications that I need to run fast as possible (AV, photo shop ect...)

Another bigger 10 gig or so for applications like games

another bigun for data files

its the fastest configuration I have tried and I used to mess with this stuff in my sleep.

This is a win 98SE / Mandrake 8.1 all fat 32. that might also be why this works. note separate drives for the win and Linux