Partitioning and Pagesys

[Fireand'chutes77]

I updated to Windows 7 Enterprise last week, and I've been re-installing software. I came across an online suggestion to move the the pagefile.sys into a separate partition to speed up performance.

http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/u...partition.mspx

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/307886

http://www.sevenforums.com/tutorials...me-shrink.html

http://www.sevenforums.com/tutorials...reate-new.html

I've never partitioned a hard-drive before. How is it done? How is it done in Win7? Is moving the pagesys to a seperate drive a good idea? How much will it boost performance?

[jeriddian]

Since this is Windows 7, and I have yet to try it myself (No need yet to do so on my part, plus my software is XP or Vista specific.....Yes W7 is supposed to handle all that, but the high end stuff I deal with is a little more finicky than that.), I cannot tell you the specific manner in which it is done on that OS. However I suspect it is not that different from the previous versions.

In case you don't know, a partition is what defines a logical drive, which actually has almost nothing to do with the physical hard drive itself. In most cases, the partition is placed on the entire hard drive, thus one HDD - one partition. But you can actually partition one physical drive into a number of partitions. The partitions can be defined by the OS, and each will get its own drive letter (Drive D:, Drive E:, etc.). Anyway I will describe how it is done in XP:

Go to Start:> Right Click on Computer:> Click on Manage:

This should bring up the following window:



In the left pane, Click on Disk Management:

This will bring up the following window in the right pane:



You can see the physical disk drives listed here, with all the partitions lsted as well. All you have to do is pick some unallocated space (note the unallocated space on my third drive), and go up to the toolbar and find the option to create a partition. Make it a logical partition (not a primary partition, as those are boot partitions), and then create. Once you create the partition, you then have to format it. That option will be up in the toolbar area as well. Once you have formatted the partition, it is ready to use, and you can start copying a file or files into it.

They have always put this feature under the name of "Disk Management", so I suspect it will be no different in W7. Now what if there is no unallocated space?. Well, XP does not let you adjust the partitions. You would need third party software (such as Partition Magic) to resize the partitions. But Vista does let you do that in its Disk Mangement. I suspect Windows Seven will let you resize the partitions as well. The option should be in the menu toolbar. If you have to do that, calculate how much space you need to create your extra partition (which would be the size of the pagefile. Pagefiles in Windows have generally been recommended to be 1.5 times the size of your RAM (i.e 4 Gb RAM = 6 Gb Pagefile size), however those recommendations may have changed with W7. You may need to investigate W7's literature to make sure of what the recommended pagefile size should be. In any case, use the resize option to reduce your primary partition down by the size of the pagefile that you need. Then click to perform the operation. The computer takes care of the rest. This will create the unallocated space you need for the separate partition to be created as I described above. That should do it for you.

[san]

They have always put this feature under the name of "Disk Management", so I suspect it will be no different in W7. Now what if there is no unallocated space?. Well, XP does not let you adjust the partitions. You would need third party software (such as Partition Magic) to resize the partitions. But Vista does let you do that in its Disk Mangement. I suspect Windows Seven will let you resize the partitions as well. The option should be in the menu toolbar. If you have to do that, calculate how much space you need to create your extra partition (which would be the size of the pagefile. Pagefiles in Windows have generally been recommended to be 1.5 times the size of your RAM (i.e 4 Gb RAM = 6 Gb Pagefile size), however those recommendations may have changed with W7. You may need to investigate W7's literature to make sure of what the recommended pagefile size should be. In any case, use the resize option to reduce your primary partition down by the size of the pagefile that you need. Then click to perform the operation. The computer takes care of the rest. This will create the unallocated space you need for the separate partition to be created as I described above. That should do it for you.

You don't need third party tools anymore, you can shrink and extend partitions within the disk management.
Just right click on the partition you would like to change. It might take some time.
See attached image.

As for the pagefile, you might just gain some performance if it's on a different physical harddisk, not just on another partition. probably you won't notice that much. for simple office stuff and enough RAM (i guess 1.5-2GB would be a good number), so will the most be stuff cached in RAM, therefore not using the pagefile.
For the pagefile size, i haven't heard anything else than the 1.5 of the RAM size. Well for me that would mean 12GB, too much for my taste.

[Fireand'chutes77]

I've got 4 gigs of RAM; I guess partitioning off the pagesys wouldn't do much, then?

[jeriddian]

I've got 4 gigs of RAM; I guess partitioning off the pagesys wouldn't do much, then?

Probably not. I think san is right, though. You won't see any improvement, if any, unless you actually create the partition on a different physical hard drive. The purpose is to allow the pagefile work to be done on another drive so that your main drive isn't wasting time doing the pagefile job, so if you only have one physical drive, it's a moot point. As to whether or not it will actually speed things up for you is also very debatable. It depends a lot on the type of computing you are doing. Suffice it to say that if you are doing a lot of computing that has to load in a lot of different data quickly and constantly from a HDD (Server work, heavy graphics, etc.) in which the page file has to be renewed constantly, then this will save you time. Otherwise, you probably won't notice any difference.

The other factor is that your pagefile can be whatever you make of it, from 0 (disabled) to as big as you want it (all of the unused space on your drive, which of corse is silly). While the recommendation has been 1.5 times the RAM size, a smaller pagefile may actually be more streamlined and faster, again depending on the type of computing you are doing. (For example, my SONAR DAW program actually recommends disabling the pagefile altogether as it interferes with real time streaming of instrument sample information from the hard drives.) You would have to experiment to find the best size for your pagefile. The 1.5 times recommendation was made for general computing needs, but I think that even a 6 Gb pagefile might be a bit much. Still, I think that unless you are doing some extraordinary computing, I wouldn't do it, as I think you will not see any improvement in performance.