swapfile on seperate Hdd?

[jam57]

Hi people, one question : is it better to have my virtual memory located on my slave harddrive or on the master? I switched to my slave but do not notice any difference. Any input?

[Pantion]

It helps to reduce fragmentation on the primary drive (which I suppose is where all your apps and windows is installed).

Just be sure that the second drive is fast enough to keep with the swapping of windows if you want windows to manage the size of the swap file... which is not recommended... set a swap file that is 2.5 or 3 times the amount of ram you have.

[CMonster]

I concur with Pantion that dynamic swapfile size can fragment a hard disk. I would add that it is best to have as much memory as possible to avoid using the swapfile at all. You can run "System Monitor" and track your swapfile ussage - if you are not using the swapfile then you will not notice a difference in speed no matter what drive it is on.

[This message has been edited by CMonster (edited 12-13-1999).]

[Axel]

All good advice so far, only thing I'd add is that, if you can't add RAM at this time and use a lot of swap file read/writes, opt to put the swap file on the drive with the fastest access speed. Check out the web sites of both drive manufacturers and see what they indicate the drive read specs are. If they are close in speed, then I'd recommend the following.

If you only have one EIDE port, keep the swap file on the master drive and dump any little used applications over on the slave.

If you have two IDE ports, I'd take the slave drive and make it the second master, then put the swap file over there.

I.E. - with the one IDE channel ,putting the swap on the slave would save some fragmentation of the primary OS drive, but wouldn't do much for speed unless the slave was quite a bit faster (I'd wonder why you don't have the OS on the faster drive, but upgrades and added drives go that way some times).

Another thing which should increase your performance would be to make sure the drive with your swap file on it is set up in the BIOS for DMA if the drive and BIOS support it. Actually, all your HD's should be set that way if possible.