I have read about the advantages of putting your page file on a seperate drive. At the moment, I have two internal drives in raid 0 and one external drive. Does anybody know what the result would be if I move it to my external usb drive?If that won't work, and I need to pick up another internal drive, does it need to be a 10000rpm drive or can I go with a 7200?

Hi Jeff,It is a good idea to move the Page File to another drive, but only if the second drive is at least as fast as the drive that Windows is installed on. I have Windows on a 74Gb Raptor, and the Page File is placed on a small partition (5Gb) at the beginning of my second 74Gb Raptor. Works just fine... I hardly see any hit at all when scenery loads during flights. I do not use any RAID arrays.Hope this helps,Greg

So I guess a good option would be to get a 36GB Raptor for my page file - put a small partition on at and us the rest for storage or something?

The best might be to get 2 Raptors!? ;-) However, I'ld only do so if you use photosceneries. As Greg stated, placing the pagefile on a seperate HD is what MS recommends (with pretty vague words and if using multiple HDs). Case you go ahead, perhaps don't make the pagefile partition too small (this obviously depends on the size of the pagefile itself)? Greg's pagefile partition could be - as the French say - 'limite-limite.' The reason (AFAIK); a HD's adressing area (MFT) is calculated in relation to the partition's FREE space. Hence, the smaller a partition, the smaller the MFT becomes. It would be interesting to learn what you're trying to achieve, Jeff? What's the nature of the question? Is your Raid partitioned? Cheers and kind regards Jaap

Thanks for the replys.No, my raid isn't partitioned.I am really just trying to speed somethings up. I get occasional stutters - sometimes they are very long and I lose all textures followed by a complete reload of every texture. When I am not getting stutters, the sim is silky smooth - it can take just about any amount of ai, clouds, weather or scenery. Most of the time the stutters happen in the middle of nowhere with light weather but there is really no pattern to their occurrences.I have tried just about everything except for this. I figured I could pick up one raptor for $117 and see how it works out. After all, I have tried so many things that are probably just snake oil. This one is recommended by MS.I even did the FS-GS System unification last year but it never cleared up these problems (everything else looked great though). I actually have a new rig for the most part and I think they are getting worse, maybe? Maybe not?

>I am really just trying to speed somethings up. I get>occasional stutters - sometimes they are very long and I lose>all textures followed by a complete reload of every texture.>When I am not getting stutters, the sim is silky smooth - it>can take just about any amount of ai, clouds, weather or>scenery. Most of the time the stutters happen in the middle of>nowhere with light weather but there is really no pattern to>their occurrences.>I am not so sure that a faster hd will help with this. I have found that there is a known stutter issue when certain types of scenery are rendered for the first time. No matter the hd, vid card, etc.Once something is in memory, it renders very smoothly.Rhett

>I am not so sure that a faster hd will help with this. I have>found that there is a known stutter issue when certain types>of scenery are rendered for the first time. No matter the hd,>vid card, etc.>>Once something is in memory, it renders very smoothly.That is the main issue I noticed with textures. The textures have already loaded and then they reload: all textures - scenery, ai traffic, ground, trees... They should already be in memory. And since my understanding of page file acts as memory by using HD space, it seems logical to me that a new HD may be a good idea so I can move my page file to it as ms recommends. With these stutters, I do not always have a texture reload.Frankly, I think stutter is a bad description of the problem, I would refer to them as mini-comas.

Get more memory....2gigs will do....and do away with pagefile altogether.Abe

>>That is the main issue I noticed with textures. The textures>have already loaded and then they reload: all textures ->scenery, ai traffic, ground, trees... They should already be>in memory. That is true, they should already be in memory. But I have noticed that FS will, for whatever reason, re-load some of these things. And when it does this, I don't notice any hard drive activity. Am I missing the hd activity? Is this re-loading coming from the swap?Rhett

Am I missing the hd activity? Is this>re-loading coming from the swap?It has to be coming from somewhere.When I fly, the PF usage usually stays below 700MB in Task manager. I don't know if this is accurate. If I get more memory, will it even be used? Does FS use all of my RAM first and then move in to PF once it has run out of RAM?

Your best bet is another gig of ram. This way you can reduce the swap file to almost nil and there will absolutely be less swap activity. Problem solved . . .Noel

>Am I missing the hd activity? Is this>>re-loading coming from the swap?>>>It has to be coming from somewhere.>The specific occurrence I am thinking of is this, for example:Go to KSEA, take off, head NNW toward Seattle. On your right somewhere is Renton Muni. Its scenery objects, (rwy, buildings, textures, etc.) will load. FS puts them into mem (I assume). Then look away, fly around for a minute or two. Then look back toward Renton Muni. The airport will RE-LOAD (!!??) and I am not sure why. When it re-loads, it produces a noticeable stutter. I've noticed it do this with about any scenery object(s) that get re-loaded.I think it's coming from memory, not the hard drive. I think that, because FS has already loaded the scenery files once, it has put them in memory. But for some reason, FS is shuttling them back out of memory...hence the re-loading that takes place for some odd reason.I'm not sure why the sim does this, but it's something I've noticed. I don't notice any hd activity when it does this, although my hd is very quiet and the hdd light is sometimes hard to notice, and also I don't pay attention sometimes. :) >When I fly, the PF usage usually stays below 700MB in Task>manager. I don't know if this is accurate. If I get more>memory, will it even be used? Does FS use all of my RAM first>and then move in to PF once it has run out of RAM?>One thing I do know about Windows XP memory management is that by default it likes to put some data into the swap file no matter what. You could have 4 gigs of ram, and load just a little app, and the OS would still put some into the swap.Rhett

So that would mean that the best way to optimize things is to deal with the page file first? Is it better to have the page file on the same drive as the OS with FS on a separate drive or is it better to have the page file on the drive with FS and have the OS on a separate drive? Also, with RAID 0, what makes the biggest difference - RAID 0 on the drives with the OS or on the drives with FS. This is just a hard decision. I don't want to reload XP but I would consider reloading FS. Or, would the best decision be - get a 150GB Raptor and put a small partition on it for page file and leave XP on my other drives in RAID 0? Is there any difference in performance between a completely separate drive as opposed to a partition? I do have problems with texture reloading but I just dug a little deeper in to my system and I realized that the voltage on my RAM was a little too low. I upped it and it seems to help.The biggest stutters occur for me when FS tries to load ai aircraft. The aircraft are not visible and it is not a issue with texture rendering, the stutters comes from fs searching for the aircraft, or so it seems. That is what I came up with from filemon.I'm sorry this is getting so long winded considering any changes would probably produce marginal results.

First off, I in no way take credit for this info, just passing on some resources I use on a regular basis...This is a really long read but SOOOO worth it. It clears up a lot of things. I believe there is one major oversight though.The editor claims that you can remove the Pagefile from your O/S drive entirely creating seperate Pagefiles on other drives. To my knowledge, this is not true and if there is not a minimum of 2-25 on your OS's drive then no other Pagefiles will be succesfully created.Quoted from another STRONG resourcehttp://www.petri.co.il/pagefile_optimization.htm"Move the Pagefile off the disk that holds your system and boot partitions to another fast and dedicated hard disk. 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 the C: drive."But a really great article regardless.http://www.rojakpot.com/showarticle.aspx?artno=143&pgno=0Enjoy. Take the time to read them both, they are worth it...-PaulPrimary RigLiquid CooledAMD FX-57 @ 3 gigsAsus A8NSLI-Premium2 gigs Corsair XMS PC3500LL 2 3 2 6 1TXFX 7900 GTX 690/1750XFX 7800 GTX 515/135024 inch Widescreen LCDDual 19 inch LCD'sRaid-0+1PCPower and Cooling 1khttp://home.comcast.net/~psolk/3monitorsa.htmlBackup RigAMD 4000 San Diego @ 2.72 Gigs Kingston Corsair XMS CL2XFX 7800 GTX 515/1350 Raid-0

Yes, those article do clear up just about every question I had. Thanks, that was really helpful.