1GB USB2 JumpDrive as Windows page file?

Possible? Good idea? Too slow?

http://news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&cid=1093&e=1&u=/pcworld/20050523/tc_pcworld/120950
from WinCustomize Forums
Is this even possible, and if so, would it be fast enough? There are obvious advantages if it would work. No mechanical parts, and no sharing of the drive with applications.

What made me think of it is that Samsung is developing a PATA SSD drive to compete with conventional hard drives. One of those would obviously make a great drive for a page file, but what of the drives that plug into your USB2 ports?
31,296 views 8 replies
Reply #1 from WinCustomize Forums Top
Quotes below from http://aumha.org/win5/a/xpvm.php
Looks like you could do it, but if you have a decent amount of RAM, it probably won't give you any significant speed gains. And it seems to me that if you are short on RAM, you'd be better off to spend the money on more RAM than dedicating a thumb drive just for a paging file.

Where do I set the placing and size of the page file?

At Control Panel | System | Advanced, click Settings in the “Performance” Section. On the Advanced page of the result, the current total physical size of all page files that may be in existence is shown. Click Change to make settings for the Virtual memory operation. Here you can select any drive partition and set either ‘Custom’; ‘System Managed’ or ‘No page file’; then always click Set before going on to the next partition.

Should the file be left on Drive C:?

The slowest aspect of getting at a file on a hard disk is in head movement (‘seeking’). If you have only one physical drive then the file is best left where the heads are most likely to be, so where most activity is going on — on drive C:. If you have a second physical drive, it is in principle better to put the file there, because it is then less likely that the heads will have moved away from it. If, though, you have a modern large size of RAM, actual traffic on the file is likely to be low, even if programs are rolled out to it, inactive, so the point becomes an academic one. If you do put the file elsewhere, you should leave a small amount on C: — an initial size of 2MB with a Maximum of 50 is suitable — so it can be used in emergency. Without this, the system is inclined to ignore the settings and either have no page file at all (and complain) or make a very large one indeed on C:

In relocating the page file, it must be on a ‘basic’ drive. Windows XP appears not to be willing to accept page files on ‘dynamic’ drives.

NOTE: If you are debugging crashes and wish the error reporting to make a kernel or full dump, then you will need an initial size set on C: of either 200 MB (for a kernel dump) or the size of RAM (for a full memory dump). If you are not doing so, it is best to make the setting to no more than a ‘Small Dump’, at Control Panel | System | Advanced, click Settings in the ‘Startup and Recovery’ section, and select in the ‘Write Debug infor


mation to’ panel
Reply #2 from WinCustomize Forums Top
In relocating the page file, it must be on a ‘basic’ drive. Windows XP appears not to be willing to accept page files on ‘dynamic’ drives.


This appears to suggest that no, it's not possible.

I have a fair amount of RAM (1GB), but there seems to be no getting away from performance hits due to the page file, short of dedicating an entire hard drive to it, which is not practical.

I do have my page file on a separate physical drive from the OS, on its own partition. Still, if I'm doing anything disk intensive on that physical drive, such as unarchiving/par checking, it bogs everything waaay down.

It takes forever to restore Maxthon from the system tray, for example, because of the competition for read cycles.

And from what Brad said in another thread, even if you have a ton of RAM and try to disable the page file altogether, it doesn't completely stop the disk thrashing.

Posted via WinCustomize Browser/Stardock Central
Ashes of the Singularity II
Reply #3 from WinCustomize Forums Top
What the hey, I took the plunge and assigned my 1GB Creative MP3 player as my one and only page file, and so far it seems to be working great.

It seems like startup went a lot faster, but what's really noticable is how quite everything is. You don't realize just how much Windows thrashes your drive until you put the page file on a flash drive.

I'll have to use it for awhile to see how the performance goes, especially after having the system up a long time, and running a lot of different applications.

If everything goes well, I'll buy a dedicated flash drive. I do have one, but it's only 256MB. My old system managed page file was about 1.5GB, so I figured I need at least a 1GB flash drive, maybe 2GB to be on the safe side.

But lots of testing to do before I worry about that.


Posted via WinCustomize Browser/Stardock Central
Reply #4 from WinCustomize Forums Top
I tried posting earlier today, but it never showed up.
Anyway...you may already know it, but you can speed things up a bit by making the initial and maximum size of your paging file the same size. (ie: for 512 RAM, I set the paging file initial and max to 2048) that way your PC isn't always wasting cycles resizing the page file. You can also defrag your paging file. I think this is the utility I used. http://majorgeeks.com/download603.html
Reply #5 from WinCustomize Forums Top
Update: I went back to my hard drive based page file. Despite being on its own partition, on a separate physical drive from my OS and all my programs, it's significantly slower than my flash drive was. It was immediately noticeable.

IMO, my experiment showed that a flash drive makes for an excellent page file drive. I've heard of people using a RAM drive for that purpose, but this is easier, and doesn't take up any of your RAM.

And mind you, I was using a 1GB MP3 player. You can get bigger and faster flash drives that would work even better. In fact, that's exactly what I'm going to do when I get some spare cash.

Most of the bigger ones have an adapter cable, so you can plug them into the back of your computer, out of the way.


Posted via WinCustomize Browser/Stardock Central
Reply #6 from Stardock Forums Top
So you'd definitely recommend using a flash drive for the paging file then?
Reply #7 from WinCustomize Forums Top
Based on my experience, yes. YMMV.

Of course, only if you have USB2 port. I would imagine USB1 would be way too slow.

Posted via WinCustomize Browser/Stardock Central
Reply #8 from WinCustomize Forums Top
Thanks for the update, Tarkus. I may try that sometime down the road.