Page File on old harddrive worth it?

[maw]

I currently have a 250GB 7200 RPM IDE drive with 16MB cache as my main drive, partitioned into OS and Data.

I also have a bunch of old 10G 7200 RPM 2MB cache harddrives lying around gathering dust, and the thought occured to me that maybe i could use one of them in my system just to hold the page file and scratch file for Photoshop.

so my question is, should i just put the page and scratch files on the Data partition of the newer drive, or put them on a completely separate but slower drive? Or is the difference too negligable to really matter?

BTW, i have 2GB of RAM in the system but I do a lot of graphics and development work on it.

 

[Zamboni]

I've done this before, but make sure the swap drive is on a different controller. There's a serious performance penalty if it tries to write data to both the master and the slave simultaneously.

(A leftover 9GB 15K rpm drive makes a handy swap drive, too.)

 

[maw]

I've done this before, but make sure the swap drive is on a different controller. There's a serious performance penalty if it tries to write data to both the master and the slave simultaneously.

(A leftover 9GB 15K rpm drive makes a handy swap drive, too.)

well i tried it out and i think i do notice a slight increase in performace. it could just be that having the swap file in one contiguous section at the beginning of the spare drive instead of all over the place on the main drive is what's making all the difference.
since i have no other use for a 10G drive, i'm thinking this is a good use for it.

i do have them both on the same contoller right now, i'll put each on thier own controller and see if that makes it even more noticable. Thanks for the tip.

 

[dchrsf]

I wouldnt use it. It addes noise (especially those old ball barring drives), heat, and usually those drives are much slower than they are worth. It may be slowing you down more than you think. Try different secerios with it. Personally, I've tried it and it's not worth it. Certain situations were slightly faster, but overall it was lagging in where I needed the speed. Best thing I've found is have a fairly fast primary drive for OS, Program Installs, and Games, and my documents and everything misc, then a seperate drive for all storage needs maybe 400gb or somthing, so when your dling from firefox, bit-torrent, and encoding a move, your OS drive wont lag reads and writes when you want to load a game. Dual-Core cpu helps if you want to keep up, but I havent experienced one yet, so I'd never know. The point: I've tried your idea and the added factors dont work as well as a real solution like 2 seperate disks. With that you also gain data security and piece of mind. Backup OS drive to Storage drive, and Storage drive's files that are vital to an external disk kept offline when not in use.

Noise was a determining factor with me, But I dont know about how sensitive you are about this. Get 2 modern drives and forget about it.