Performance gain with virtual memory on 2 harddisk?
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Thread: Performance gain with virtual memory on 2 harddisk?

  1. #1
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    Performance gain with virtual memory on 2 harddisk?

    Anyone know whether there will be performance increase if i make two virtual memory on two separate harddisk? Like i have 500mb on c: then 500mb on d:, which is 2 harddisk not 2 partition. Will windowxp be smart enough to go back and forth between the two...if one of them is busy? what i mean is if i play game thats on c:..will it use d: as virtual memory...or when i am downloading lots things to d: ...will it use c: as virtual memory?

    Thanks all

  2. #2
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    Hello chickeneye. Welcome to VirtualDr.
    I have never known of anyone having 2 Virtual Memory files. Somehow I don`t think this would be a good idea.
    What I have read is when you have 2 Hard Drives put the Operating System one one drive and the Virtual Memory file on the other as long as this drive is as fast as (or faster than) the drive which has the Operating System. Some people have noticed a performance increase with this set up, but it works better for some than for others.

    Just make sure it is big enough. Set it to be 1.5 times the size of your RAM

    Elaine
    Last edited by dunedin; January 10th, 2004 at 09:29 AM.

  3. #3
    DrMDJ is offline Virtual PC Specialist!!!
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    NT systems, including XP, allow for multiple pagefiles split over drives/partitions. Splitting it across partitions on the same drive is not effective though. Having it split over multiple physical drives can be. NT can initiated multiple simultaneous I/Os, but that doesn't mean it will always make the best choice in terms of the pagefile it tries to write to. In your case here I think you would probably get the best performance by having a small/minimal pagefile area defined on your main drive and defining a properly sized main one on your second drive.
    Please remember to post back whether your problem is resolved or
    not, so that others may gain from the knowledge.

  4. #4
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    To add to above, of course posted while I was thinking & typing;

    You may certainly divide the Virtual Memory between drives with success. I don't know what strategy Windows uses for the swapfiles, how intelligent it is (Windows intelligent... !), but using more than one drive will have potential advantages.

    Obviously, if VM is on a drive that is mostly not being accessed for other purposes, access to the swapfile can be quicker. If you are using IDE drives, it is best if the drives are on different IDE channels, as the drives on one IDE channel cannot both be accessed at once.

    SCSI is inherently multi-threaded and drives can be accessed simultaneously, they just have to share the bandwidth. SATA only has one drive per channel, so this is automatically an effective strategy.
    Last edited by Platypus; January 10th, 2004 at 10:01 AM.

  5. #5
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    "If you have two or more hard drives, especially if they reside on separate IDE channels, it is possible to Strip the Page File across these two drives. Windows XP has code within it that will enable a RAID-Type Stripping. Therefore, Windows XP will through its internal algorithms place information in the separate drives. By accessing both of the Drives at the same time to read/write information, Windows XP will considerably improve its performance!"
    If you're happy and you know it......it's your meds.

  6. #6
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    I did it a while back, as an experiment. I can't say I've noticed any impovement, but then I have 1GB of RAM, so the pagefile doesn't get a lot of use in my case. It certainly doesn't make the performance worse, so you may as well try it.
    Nick.

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