Hardware Questions

T

trkorecky

Right now, I have only one. Would it be beneficial to take my old comp's hard drive (4.3 gigabytes. Not sure yet of the make/model/RPM as the sticker was torn off) and make it a 4 gig page file only drive? As in, keep my 160 gig for everything else, but also hook up the 4.3 gig for the page file?
Yeah, I know. I'm in the process of saving for more ram to not use the pagefile as much.
 
Well, since I currently have my page file on the drive I have everything on, the performance is lowered because it has to read game data whlie writing to the page file at the same time. I'm thinking that putting a page file on the 4.3 gig hd will increase performance because it'd be easier to write while it reads instead of trying to do both with the same hd at the same time.
 
trkorecky said:
Well, since I currently have my page file on the drive I have everything on, the performance is lowered because it has to read game data whlie writing to the page file at the same time.  I'm thinking that putting a page file on the 4.3 gig hd will increase performance because it'd be easier to write while it reads instead of trying to do both with the same hd at the same time.
Click to expand...

I know this sounds stupid... but is that possible to do?
and possible to do efficiently?

really... IF that harddrive is on the same IDE chain as your other HD.... I am not sure if there would be a benefit... but I am curious to see if you can get it to work right and if you do.... if you see a noticeable difference :)

that would be cool if so.

†B†V† :hat
 
I'll have to try it out sometime. Right now though, I'm involved with gaming, the summer homework (which I have yet to do...), and making movies, so I don't have much time anymore.
I should make some short movies to promote GA...
 
I've always been under the impression a page file is kinda like a closet. It's where you throw something that you're not ready to totally get rid of yet but is pretty soon gonna be tossed out....


a page file is just a small portion of a hard disk used as a dumping ground for your ram. Basically it's for data that was in ram that hasn't been used recently. Using another drive just for a page file (swap file if you're not talking windows 2000, NT, or XP) is not the same as having another 4 gigs of ram..... and more than likely won't be of any use what so ever.


That's just what I think, I've never even thought about trying something like what you were talking, and would be interested in hearing what happened, hopefully you'll proove me wrong but if that's the case then you probably would have heard of a lot of people doing that since small capacity drives are pretty much a dime a dozen.
 
I was just thinking that when I'm loading a large game, say Far Cry or Unreal Tournament 2004, and the computer has to swap some of the old data in my ram to the page file, it would have to try to write the data to the disk while reading the game data from the disk. To me, that would seem like it could cause slowdown. If there's a second disk, the computer can send the data to the second disk to write while it reads from the first. Otherwise one disk would try to read and write at the same time with the same heads. I'm probably missing some vital information here, but that's my theory as of now.
 
Try it and let us know how it works :D


Another thing to wonder about...... that 4 gig hard drive probably isn't as fast rpm wise as your newer one and it probably doesn't have as much of a buffer as the newer one does....


there's a lot of variables in this science experiment!
 
I just need to hook it up, format, put the page file on, and test it out.  Are there any benchmarking utilities that'll do the testing?
 
Installed it, no problems. Seems to be running alright. Not sure if anything's running faster or not, but I'll be sure to let you know.
 
well.... if you didn't notice before that you needed a performance increase..... how would you notice it after you did the increase?


†B†V† :hat
 
did you ever try this?  did it work?

If so, how did you get the drive to be set as a page file only drive?

†B†V† :hat
 
I installed the drive, put the page file on it through Windows XP, and then tried it out.

Let's just say I didn't notice any performance increase, and I think it was bad for my computer's health (I'm already taking more out of my power supply than I should...).
 
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