Speed of two hard drives?

My computer has two separate hard drives. As far as I know they are exactly the same brand and model, it's just that there are two of them. They are labeled 'Local Disk (C:)' and 'New Volume (E:)', respectively. So far I'm only storing my files on a portion of the C drive and nothing at all on the E drive. My computer also only has 256 megabytes of RAM, so I should have at least 512 megabytes of virtual memory allocated between my two drives.





What I'm wondering is, how would the speed of the two hard drives work in terms of accessing the virtual memory? Let's say I want 1024 megabytes of page file space in total. Would it work faster to set 512 megabytes on each of the two hard drives, or 1024 on just drive C, or 1024 on just drive E, or some other combination? Also, is there a maximum as well as a minimum amount of page file space I should have in order to maximize my computer's speed and minimize the wear on the components?

Speed of two hard drives?
Well, theres alot to cover here so hang in there.....


When you use swap space, it wears on your hard drive because now memory is being writen to the drive instead of a memory modual.....


Anyhow, to improve performace, set virtual memory on drive E to "initial 1500 mb" and "maximum 2000 mb".....this will give you 2gigs of virtual memory so youll never run short.....then shut off the paging file on the C drive. What this does is allow the virtual memory to be written only to E while still being able to read from the local disk C..... because if it was to read from C and read and write virtual memory on the same disk, you lose about half of its speed.....since the majority of the operating system has to access C to function, E is the best choice to use for swap space......





Update: Jon, windows will automatically use both disks for virtual memory, but it will choose the fastest of the 2 and use it exclusively untill the it runs low then it will begin to use the other drive......


And raid 0 is much faster, the more drives you have in an array, the more mbps you will get out of them....I have 3 160gb drives in raid 0 running 170mbps, where 1 IDE drive typically runs 50mbps.....
Reply:You have an interesting question but I think windows will only use a page file located on a single drive. Windows automatically configures your page file as needed so you don't need to worry about how much you have or don't, when its low it will increase, and when its high and unneeded then it will become smaller. If you ran your hard drives in RAID 0 then it MIGHT run faster but I'm not sure.


Besides, buying physical ram would help your computer more then what size your page file is.