re: Paging file & external drive
Wednesday, October 15, 2008 at 10:14 am
Windows XP Annoyances Discussion Forum
Posted by C K
(6910 messages posted)
You never want to put a paging file on an external, and especially not on a firewire.
Firewire interfaces seem to have more issues than USB. I've seen many machines
that have had issues where the connection would drop unexpectedly, and the machine
would have to be rebooted once or twice to get it back. It is a known issue with
firewire. USB is less problematic, but can still drop. You also are adding traffic
to a buss that the internal drives won't use and will slow down the page file access.
The internal drives work in DMA (Direct Memory Access) mode and actually bypass
the CPU to communicate with the physical memory when data needs to be moved thus
reducing the CPU load especially when other apps need it more.
The FSB (Front Side Buss) on your machine can be a big bottleneck if you are trying
to move to much data on it (you have an older slower buss), and data moving to or
from a drive that can't work in a native DMA mode slows everything down, and can/will
totally choke your system depending on what is being called for by your applications.
In this case, the drive is in DMA mode (between the interface and the drive), but
the firewire interface isn't working in DMA mode, because it requires the CPU to
be involved. This is why a USB CD/DVD burner can be slowed down and even stopped
in some cases, and produce more coasters if you are trying to do other tasks with
the machine IME, even if it has burn proof technology in it (as they all do now).
If your external disconnects for any reason, Windows (W2K or XP makes no difference
which one) will hang and crash IME (W2K is worse). This can result in a system that
won't boot in a worst case scenerio and sometimes won't be able to be repaired IME.
As for the size, let Windows manage it unless you have an application that requires
a set size, as some do. Setting it to big requires Windows to manage a resource
that is to large and it can actually slow down your system. Physical memory corrolates
to virtual memory (physical memory is asigned "spaces" in virtual memory plus a
little spare) so having it many times larger than the physical memory doesn't add
any speed and actually is worse for Windows from a management standpoint.
The only real advantage to a user set size page file is that it won't fragment or
at least will have fewer fragments than when Windows manages the page file. You
won't notice a difference unless you are using applications that require a different
virtual memory management scheme.
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