- February 11, 2009
- 20
- 2
I thought I would add a bit here. As an IT infrastructure specialist with 16 years experience I have a lot of experience with performance optimisation. It IS true that separating swap and OS on physically different disks will increase the performance of your system in a traditional sense and that putting your swap file on a second partition of a disk will in fact push it further out from the centre of the disk and slow it down, but you have to put this in context. The only time it will slow down your system is in times of excessive paging and this performance bottleneck will only become a problem if you have insufficient memory in your system.
There are other good reasons to partition you system disk, moving your page file to another partition on the same physical disk is not one of them. I personally partition my System Disk to allow enough space for the OS, page file (1.5 to 2.5 times the amount of physical memory) and program files. Leave a fair bit of space so that if you upgrade your memory in the future that you have enough room to expand your paging file. I then use the rest of the space for music, pictures, and network backups of my other PCs and then use my second drive for video applications (storage of static content and TV buffering and recording). The reason I do this is so that I can easily rebuild my machine without having to worry about backing up or shuffing around data.
Partitioning a disk is always something that can bite back in the end because you are corralling free space into two smaller chunks that may not be where you need it in the future. That being said, with the size of disks these days it is quite reasonable to have a 20-40 Gb system partition and to have a second partition on this disk for non-volatile data (or even a clean image of your system partition).
There are other good reasons to partition you system disk, moving your page file to another partition on the same physical disk is not one of them. I personally partition my System Disk to allow enough space for the OS, page file (1.5 to 2.5 times the amount of physical memory) and program files. Leave a fair bit of space so that if you upgrade your memory in the future that you have enough room to expand your paging file. I then use the rest of the space for music, pictures, and network backups of my other PCs and then use my second drive for video applications (storage of static content and TV buffering and recording). The reason I do this is so that I can easily rebuild my machine without having to worry about backing up or shuffing around data.
Partitioning a disk is always something that can bite back in the end because you are corralling free space into two smaller chunks that may not be where you need it in the future. That being said, with the size of disks these days it is quite reasonable to have a 20-40 Gb system partition and to have a second partition on this disk for non-volatile data (or even a clean image of your system partition).