Virtual Memory question.

[Trege]

I've been searching for awhile now and I still can't find a clear cut answer
to this question.

I've been trying to manage my Virtual Memory for best speed, and I heard mixed
opinion's online but heres the question.

Is it faster to have a 2nd hard drive use the pagefile instead of the main drive the system is on? I recently installed a 2nd hard drive.

If it matters I'm using Windows 7.

 

[Shardvex]

I don't think another hard drive would be any slower, unless it's an external one.

I know everything, just not at once. It's a virtual memory problem.
-Heh, I couldn't resist that joke, because you mentioned virtual memory! :)

 

[Cinefast]

Are you sure you've got your terminology right? I think you mean swapping, as Virtual Memory is simply a memory management technique that makes use of an MMU.

However, using a different, less-used HDD for the pagefile is better, yes. This way the heads needn't be constantly moving across the disk to find the pagefile's location and then back to what you were doing prior.

 

[SSNTails]

Back in the day, it was advantageous to have your virtual memory swapfile on a separate, fast disk, but nowadays you won't notice much difference.

 

[Cue]

I don't think another hard drive would be any slower, unless it's an external one.

Should be faster, your system drive is hit a lot more than your extra drives, so having the pagefile on that drive in theory is beneficial.

 

[Blitzzo]

but nowadays you won't notice much difference.

This implies that software hasn't gotten any more bloated, when in fact, the exact opposite has happened. Developers are getting worse and worse at software engineering so we still have applications which rely on a ridiculous amount of hard drive I/O to start up for no good reason. Combine that with memory disk swapping and you're in a world of pain.

For all it's worth, just get more RAM. The fact that you actually made a topic on this suggests to me that you don't have enough RAM. If you have at least 2GB of RAM you're better off just disabling swap space as performance in Windows will actually increase as a result (since Redmond apparently thinks it's a good idea to swap to disk even when you only have half your RAM being used up).