PageFile Partition on Seperate Drive - How big should it be?

[VirtueTech]

Hello everyone,

I have a T60P Lenovo, that has 4 GB of ram (Only 3GB usable on Windows XP).

I have two hard drives, the one default internal, and one in the Hard Drive Bay Adapter.

I want to use the 2nd drive for my XP PageFile.

Currently my pagefile size is 1024 * 3 (GB of RAM) * 1.5 = 4608 MB

Questions:
1. So if I make my partition 5 GB will it be a problem?
2. Does a pagefile grow automatically? If so it would run out of space.
3. I plan on making the partition FAT32, but is a 5GB partition too big? I heard there was a 4GB limit, yes/no?

Thanks for your time.

[RealBlackStuff]

This should give you a good idea:
http://www.petri.co.il/pagefile_optimization.htm

[VirtueTech]

Thanks for your reply. Yeah I read through that, along with a couple of other sites.

None of them mention the actual size the partition should be on the 2nd hard drive.

My worries:
1. If I make it too large, it will leave space for fragmentation.
2. If I make it too small, it will need to grow and not ahve any space to do so.

Currently I have set it to a 9GB partition, with around a 6 GB pagefile, on my 2nd hard drive.

[Aroc]

1. This is not really an issue that should overly concern you
2. This should concern you. If I do feel compelled to create a pagefile partition, I typically make mine 12GB (so that a 4GB page file uses about 33% of the space, which lets a disk defragmenter do its job, if you have an automatically scheduled one. Though defragmentation isn't normally necessary. Many of the performance metrics have suggested that pagefile access is random rather than sequential. Though perhaps your system and work loads behave differently?

Generally the setting you should be using for your page file is System Managed Size. Explicitly setting a pagefile size is a throw-back to the NT 3.x and NT 4.0 days. Like you wrote, if the page file needs to expand and it can't expand you set yourself up for problems. If you are really concerned about the performance impact during pagefile expansion, you should really be purchasing more RAM rather than be concerned about pagefile tuning. I've just never found it to be worth the effort to highly tune it either on a secretary's office PC or on a high-end CAD workstation. It just seems to have little appreciable effect anymore (assuming you have a sufficient pagefile!), however you are welcome to try. I would suggest leaving sufficient pagefile functionality on the system/boot partition so that a proper memory.dmp file from a STOP error can be generated and later debugged by someone.

See also (link)

[Aroc]

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/314463

You cannot create a file larger than (2^32)-1 bytes (this is one byte less than 4 GB) on a FAT32 partition.

I believe you will be limited to a 4GB pagefile on a FAT32 partition, if I understand this correctly.

[RealBlackStuff]

Also from the horse's mouth:
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/237740

There it says that the max. size is 4095MB, but can be larger IF you have the right hardware/software.