Using the information companies and people have written on Partitioning Hard Disks and Optimizing Hard Disk Performance can defintely improve your system speed. One advantage of installing additional disks and/or creating additional partitions is the ability to move Virtual Memory from the %SYSTEM% drive (usually C:\ by default) to a different logical drive or even… a different physical drive. This improves system performance.

Virtual Memory is used for the temporary physical swapping of data to hard disk by physical RAM. The System RAM writes and holds data on disk temporarily (like sort of a storage bin) until physical RAM needs it again.  By adjusting System Properties and moving the page file (to a location different than the SYSTEM drive) the system hard drive can then focus on reads and writes related to system files and system processes. This is good since the SYSTEM generally has lots to do already. Bottom line, offloading these Memory files and Memory processes to write/read other than your SYSTEM DRIVE helps your system run better.

The greatest improvement comes when you can employ an additional separate physical disk. Using a physical disk that is separate from the SYSTEMS physical disk can help your system run even better than moving the Virtual Memory to a different partition on the same physical disk. A separate disk means a separate physical spinning platter (a hard drive) devoted exclusively to helping RAM get it’s memory jobs done. This equals performance boost, boost, boost.

One elusive point on this topic is whether or NOT, Dynamic Disks (logical volumes that are used for software RAID and extensible in the Windows architeture) can be used as the location for your Virtual Memory. My own experience shows this is possible but not suggested. Personally, in a Windows Server test, performance generally degraded when a second physical disc, (which had been Converted to a Dynamic Disk), was used for Virtual Memory . Upon review, some web surfing and some article reading (like the one below - Virtual Memory in Windows XP), I now also share this knowledge, that using a Basic Disc is the better way to go and in some cases (the only way to go).

 Go for it! Try out using another partition / physical disk (of the Basic Disc type) for your Virtual Memory store. You may find the performance improvement very positive and quite literally, human discernable.

LINKS

• Considerations when planning disk partitions
• Change Virtual Memory Settings
• How to set performance options in Windows XP
• Virtual Memory in Windows XP