Hardrives for swap files
- Thread starter jvd
- Start date
chavvdarrr
Veteran
It will be fine. Just make a nice 5GB partition on itjvd said:
Seriously, how much of improvement you expect ?!
J, if you want to measure performance increases with a magnifying glass, you should use a drive that has as high a capacity as possible (higher density means fewer head movements). Also, make the swap partition the first partition on the drive, and make the swap file the first file placed on that drive, that way the file ends up at the outer edge where tracks have the most sectors.
As previously mentioned, more than 2GB swap is most likely a waste. When will you ever use that much page memory? It'd take minutes just to fill the swapfile.
As previously mentioned, more than 2GB swap is most likely a waste. When will you ever use that much page memory?
It'd take minutes just to fill the swapfile. Killer-Kris
Regular
I suppose my question is why not just actually buy RAM instead? Of course I realize that you can't get multiple GBs for the same price you can like w\ a harddrive, but it would be so much faster, even if you only added a few hundred MBs.
Do you realise that any 32bit system can only adress 4GB of memory adresses? (independent if it's ram or a swapfile on a harddisk?)
And that Windows only ever gives 2 GB memory to an application?
Really... with the current ram prices, it makes no sense to buy a 'fast' harddrive to speed up swapping. When swapfile speed is becoming important enought that you'd consider buying a faster harddisk, you simply need more ram.
And that Windows only ever gives 2 GB memory to an application?
Really... with the current ram prices, it makes no sense to buy a 'fast' harddrive to speed up swapping. When swapfile speed is becoming important enought that you'd consider buying a faster harddisk, you simply need more ram.
not true.vb said:
placing my swap file on a 5400 rpm 4 GB HD is an improvement over using a partition on the main drive during heavy disk access/swap access.
Most of the time, you can't tell the difference, but its splitting up the I/O that really matters.
With the swap on the same physical disk as the OS,etc, during heavy swap use the system really bogs down if it also has to retrieve or write data from the HD.
vb said:
Nope, just the phenomenally slow nature of harddrives, being mechanical devices in nature. Think about it, when a memory access measured on a nanosecond scale in a modern CPU can easily take a few hundred CPU clock cycles to complete, how much don't you lose by first accessing a harddrive controller chip (several writes across a bus that needs to be arbited for and is much slower than main RAM), and then wait for it to contact the harddrive across a different bus, wait for it to move the headstack and position it over the correct cylinder, wait for the right sector(s) to rotate in under the heads (several milliseconds on average just for this step), retrieve the data and have the controller chip interrupt the CPU and say everything is completed?
Harddrives are INCREDIBLY slow. CPUs can do many millions of random accesses to main memory per second. To a harddrive it's perhaps a few hundred, if that much. It has extremely little to do with the southbridge, it's almost exclusively because of the horrible mechanical nature of harddrives.
Well. I have a 1 gig dimm of ddr 400 on its way. THat will bring me up to 2 gigs .
The hardrive would be nice for loading zones first off as my load times aren't the best and also when the game hits virtual ram which it will even with 2 gigs of ram due to memory leaks still in the game .
I was looking and found i coudl get anothre hardrive same model and size as mine for 70$ . do you think raid would help more than a second drive for a swap file ?
The hardrive would be nice for loading zones first off as my load times aren't the best and also when the game hits virtual ram which it will even with 2 gigs of ram due to memory leaks still in the game .
I was looking and found i coudl get anothre hardrive same model and size as mine for 70$ . do you think raid would help more than a second drive for a swap file ?
If you've got a fast HD which has some bad sectors but is out of warranty it can make a good swap drive. If the bad sectors are fairly low down (in the first gig, for example) stick on a partition big enough to go past that point then put the swap file on the rest.
Been using a couple of bad sector drives for similar things here for a while. You run the risk that one day another sector will die and some app or Windows will crash on you but it will probably be a bit faster than an antique 3G drive in pre-UDMA modes. And it could even be more reliable.
Been using a couple of bad sector drives for similar things here for a while. You run the risk that one day another sector will die and some app or Windows will crash on you but it will probably be a bit faster than an antique 3G drive in pre-UDMA modes. And it could even be more reliable.
raptors make a big difference. You can really tell.BRiT said:
epic
The Raptor is a bitchin' fast harddrive, that's for sure, but I think I'll wait with buying anything new now until desktop drives start to migrate down to the 2.5" form factor...
