Earlier today I was on a site reading a gentleman's partitioning strategy and he recommended putting the pagefile on the first partition of a 2nd HDD.  I've seen this recommended before, but what prompts this post is that in his example this pagefile partition is a primary partition.

I guess I never gave much thought to it before, but now that I am thinking about it, does it have to be a primary partition, or could it be a logical partition?

This is the site I was on.  I think I might have gotten there through a link from another post on this board, actually.

http://www.aumha.org/a/parts.htm

The C Man, if your objective is to increase hard disk performance, you may wish to review the discussion of Diskeeper’s I-FAAST technology in this thread.

The C Man, you want to cut down on the fragmentation of your paging file?  If so, the free PageDefrag utility might be of interest.

Most good defragmentation utilities (including Diskeeper 2007) also have the capability to defrag the paging file, too.

I do not know the answer to your original question, but the motivation for asking it may dissipate if you adopt the use of a tool such as Diskeeper 2007 that continuously and unobtrusively defragments in the background.

Ok, thanks Brian.

Rad wrote on Dec 15^th, 2006 at 4:20pm:

This partitioning strategy is for an upcoming build that I don't have the HDDs for yet.  I was thinking of getting a 74 GB WD Raptor as the main HDD.  You're saying it would be a bad move to put the pagefile on a slower 7200 rpm drive then, huh?

My main reason for doing it isn't necessarily to get a performance gain, but to cut down on the amount of space the OS takes up, thereby making my Ghost images smaller.  This build will have 512 MB RAM initially, and possibly permanently.  I may up that to 1 GB, but have no initial plans to do so.

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Don't worry about Image file size. In Ghost 2003, pagefile.sys, hiberfil.sys and other "one session files" are excluded from the Image. I don't know about Ghost 9 and up but I don't think that they backup useless crap.

Set the pagefile on C: to user managed with the sizes 768 MB - 1536 MB which is 1.5 x RAM - 3.0 x RAM. I use that setting and it has never been increased in size. As far as I know, used pagefile has never been over a few hundred MB when I work in Photoshop and PowerPoint simultaneously.

Christer

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I use ~5 GB of my 12 GB system partition. I don't have very much installed, Office, Acrobat, Photoshop, Nero and a few smaller applications. Even if you go "lean", 5 GB is way too small. You will grow out of space. Personally, on a 74 GB Raptor, I would make the system partition 20% and the data partition 80%. The 7200 rpm SATA would be partitioned in two for data backup and Ghost Images. I never ever defragment the partition with Ghost Images. (I actually have an 80 GB HDD partitioned in two. When the first partition gets full, I shift to the second partition and when that one gets full, I reformat the first partition.)

You haven't mentioned (I think) separating programs on a partition of their own. No matter what, the installer writes to the system partition, in C:\Windows, C:\Documents and settings and to the registry. That would involve keeping two Images synchronised, one of the system partition and another of the programs partition. Any change to the programs partition would spill over on the system partition.

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I am not sure that would be wise. Programs are designed to "request" a certain amount of Virtual Memory. Windows is smart enough to not assign all to RAM but most of it to the pagefile (programmers always overdo the request). I don't know if these "assignments" in the pagefile are counted in "pagefile usage" but no matter what, with 512 MB RAM, I would not go lower than 256 MB - 512 MB pagefile. Well, to be honest, I would let it have 768 MB - 1536 MB even if pagefile usage monitors indicate that it doesn't get used. (1.5xRAM - 3.0xRAM is the Microsoft recommendation for a "semi fixed" pagefile.)

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That's my understanding of the matter.

Another thing to consider, if you use Photoshop, put the scratch file on a partition other than C:. Adobe recommends to put it on a different partition than the one with the pagefile. Some create a small partition for the scratch file alone.

Christer

For what it's worth, this is my thinking regarding having a separate partition for both the OS and Programs....

With them both installed on the same partition as they are on my system currently, it seems like you needlessly back up all those static program files every time you make a Ghost image.  With the programs on a separate partition this would again cut down on the size of the OS Ghost image.

So do a fresh install of Windows and immediately make an image of it.

Then customize Windows to your liking and image the OS partition again.

Then in your programs partition install all of your "core" programs (your mainstays, stuff you know you'll always want to have installed). Now your OS partition has changed somewhat because there are plenty of new registry entries and DLLs installed, so image it again.

You can now backup/clone your programs partition one time and be done with it (unless/until you found other programs you wanted to install permanently) and then never have to restore it again unless of a HDD failure.

At this point you have your system set up exactly as you want it. Any time you find another program you want to install permanently just install it to your programs partition and then immediately image the OS partition, and do an incremental backup of the Programs partition.

As I was developing this partition & image strategy in my mind it occurred to me that if you were in the habit of frequently experimenting with other software outside of your "core" apps and were constantly installing and uninstalling them, instead of using those program's own uninstall routines or Windows' Add/Remove Programs and not knowing for sure if it removed every last trace of the program and reg entries, you could just manually delete that program's folder from the programs partition, restore your OS image, and be back to where you were prior to installing the program in the first place.  Sure, it would take longer, but I'm just saying if you were really anal about it you could do it that way.  If not, then just uninstall them the 'normal' way.

I don't know if those reading this will think that this strategy is excessive or overblown or whatever, but in my mind it makes perfect sense.