to do with "Sony Vaio -- 2 hard drives"

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Posted: Mon Nov 10, 2008 8:02 pm

I've also heard it helps to speed things up if you keep your paging files on a separate partition, or even better, a separate drive if you have two. Don't ask me why. Confused

click this instead. Wink

Baiting Guru Joined: 03 Mar 2006 Posts: 7103 Location: Yes

Cabin Boy -- nice necro of this thread.

I'm splitting off to continue the conversation (if necessary). Wink

Posted: Mon Nov 10, 2008 8:37 pm

Erm.. what's a necro? does it mean my post wasn't relevant to the topic? cos from what I could tell, people were discussing the advantages/ disadvantages of having several hard drives, or several partitions on one machine.

And that's exactly what my post was about.

Baiting Guru Joined: 03 Mar 2006 Posts: 7103 Location: Yes

You have read our FAQ right?

Posted: Mon Nov 10, 2008 8:45 pm

Yes, what did I do wrong?

Baiting Guru Joined: 03 Mar 2006 Posts: 7103 Location: Yes

If you read it then you would know. Use "Ctrl+F" and type in "necro".

Listen, it's not an egregious offense. It happens quite often. Most people shrug and move along.

Posted: Mon Nov 10, 2008 8:49 pm

Oh big deal, sorry for answering an old thread, with some decent information. Oh, and I really object to your tone. You're Implying I can't read? I'm stupid? or I'm a liar?

You could of politely informed me of my mistake! No wonder new members don't hang around for long if that's what they get for trying to be helpful!

Bye

Posted: Mon Nov 10, 2008 9:12 pm

I don't think JMR meant any offense. It's just one of our ways of keeping things tidy. You can answer any thread you like, it's just that if a thread has gone stale, we prefer that you link to the old one instead of bumping it back to the top.

It's not a big deal. JMR is an extremely important and busy baiter. He doesn't always have time to make nice nice. Wink

Posted: Mon Nov 10, 2008 9:20 pm

I understand and take your point luckey, there are a lot of busy people in the world, but I think It could of been pointed out politely just as quickly without the "oh well, if you had even bothered to read the FAQ." (which you are obviously lying about) attitude. I didn't come here to be talked down too.

But thanks for smoothing it over Wink

Baiting Guru Joined: 03 Mar 2006 Posts: 7103 Location: Yes

Let's not be passive-aggressive now Cabin Boy. You didn't know what a "necro" was despite being a member here for nearly 9 months. I find that hard to believe, but if that's the case, I pointed you to a nice, well-written FAQ which would give you your answer (since you couldn't be bothered to search for the term yourself).

Having your post split off is not a black mark against you. We do it all the time. It's one of our many many quirks. I also have a thing about the word "moist" (but, strangely, I don't mind split infinitives). I apologize for being brusque with you and hope we can put this behind us as we move forward towards a new future -- together. Yes we can!

Posted: Mon Nov 10, 2008 9:34 pm

Thanks for carving out time to set things straight JMR.

See what I mean RTCB? He's really a big sweetheart. Very Happy

Posted: Mon Nov 10, 2008 9:40 pm

au contraire, I googled the term before asking, and it is (as I had thought) a Greek prefix, meaning dead. The search function on here generally turns up loads of mostly unrelated stuff, and frankly life's too short.

Anyway, apology accepted, don't let it happen again Laughing

Now can someone put my teddy back in my pram please.. I can't reach it Embarassed

Elite Baiter Joined: 19 Jan 2008 Posts: 1043

Come on guys, at least try to keep it on topic.

My old comp had its paging file and boot sector on a high speed HDD. It loaded up pretty speedily.

I'm thinking of doing the smae with an SSD when they become a bit more viable.

Posted: Tue Nov 11, 2008 12:33 am

I'm using a laptop with just the one hard drive, so don't have the luxury of such things. I guess in these days of increasingly RAM hungry software, it pays to squeeze every ounce out of your your Vmem and if you can give it it's own drive then that has to help.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not an expert on this, but most of the info I've found on the net seems to say that the best thing to do is to split the boot and paging files onto separate drives if possible.

Posted: Tue Nov 11, 2008 1:17 am

SSD is not an option yet, the I/O is lower than on a speedy HDD, it would only slow down your system.

As for a one drive system it's important to make sure your pagefile isn't fragmented too much. What I usually do is park the VMEM on a secundary partition (or remove it altogether) , reboot, then defragment c:\ , set the VMEM back to the c:\ drive (fixed size of 2 times the RAM available) and reboot again. That way windoze recreates the pagefile on an empty, defragmented block, which will boost performance a bit.

Posted: Tue Nov 11, 2008 1:24 am

I have my paging files tucked away on their own little partition. Do I still need to defrag that partition? It all shows as green unmovable or white empty , and I presumed it got overwritten all the time.

Posted: Tue Nov 11, 2008 1:26 am

Its because of the RAM hungry software that you want to max your memory and not have to deal with VM. Having to use VM kills hard drives, especially small laptop drives. If it means taking smaller memory modules out to make room for larger, so be it. Talking about defraging- our MIS suggests that all info be backed up prior to defragging laptop drives and never defragging those portable laptop drives.

Posted: Tue Nov 11, 2008 2:13 am

Huh? No defragging on laptop drives? No use of virtual memory? Of course you do. Haven't had a problem with that in the 10 years I use notebooks, or even longer on any PC I owned and still own .. The necessity with NTFS is not as much as it was with FAT16/ FAT32, but still useful.

And yes: RAM is the key .. put as much in there as possible, those modules are really cheap these days, but paging is absolutely necessary. My notebook is defragging now, taking 100% of the physical 3 GB, and 1.5 GB of page memory .. you simply cannot do without Vmem.

Backups is always a good idea though, but that should be a standard routine, daily or weekly, depending on the value of the stored data.

Posted: Tue Nov 11, 2008 3:42 am

Our MIS suggest never defragging those portable USB drives, those laptop hard drives in a black plastic case. For portable USB hard drives, I buy the full size ones with built in cooling fans having learned a costly lesson. I would also consider going easy on the hard disk drive in luggable computers. I've lost two hard disks in laptops. The first took a few years, the second took 6 hours. I was upgrading a new computer to XP Pro from Media Edition and ran into some windoze problems, backed out of the install, scraped it clean, scanned it, and reinstalled back to the factory image. I got could not get a clean boot, so swept it again, surface scanned it, rinse and repeat. After 6 hours the hard drive had a squealing bearing. Our MIS has locked out defrag on the company computers. I asked why and they said it was because there were some retentive people that would run it everyday and kill the drive. I have a company issued tablet computer with a microdrive that I will never defrag.

Posted: Tue Nov 11, 2008 8:25 am

Along a similar vein, I've just been reading up about ReadyBoost. In a nutshell, it seems you can move your Vram onto a flash drive and get most of the same benefits as using a separate HDD. Now that seems like a practical alternative for the laptop wallah. Smile

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