Opinions please…
Long time no yak - happy new year to all on the board.
This is an XP tweak I was looking at - sounds like RAID striping - I wonder if anyone with multi Hard Drives (not just mulitiple partitions) has tried this and what your thoughts are on it…
http://www.tweakxp.com/tweak1686.aspx
Yeah it can help the performance of Windows with it’s Page (Swap) File.
I’d be more inclined to place the Page File on a separate drive than the one Windows is on (which I have done in the past) but I didn’t notice any markable differences. Same goes for assigning Page File space on both drives.
This is a fine tweak for normal computing but in a DAW with only two drives … you don’t want Windows paging to your audio drive while you are trying to stream audio to/from that drive.
-Ken
Makes sense, crankz1, thanks for the response. Gonna do a dual boot soon and also will be installing a separate audio HD, so I’m looking into potential tweaks…
I’ve never tried this tweak but I doubt if it works like RAID stripping because it would force you to make the logical partitions the same size (which I don’t think it does?).
An even simpler, more essential tweak, is to make virtual memory a fixed size (miniumum = maximum). This is so it doesn’t grow while you’re processing something.
Another easy, simple tweak is to disable the paging of the NT executive:
<!–QuoteBegin>
| Quote |
| HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE/System/CurrentControlSet/Control/Session Manager/Memory Management/ DisablePagingExecutive = 1 |
Having said all this, you basically NEVER want your DAW to do any paging at all. VM was some clever idea that some programmer put it to NT so that the system would never run out of memory (and because the programmer could do it), but you never want to use it in real life. You should always have enough physical memory to do whatever your requirements are. You should never have too many applications going at once (unless you need to), which forces the OS to use VM. End of story.
Mr Soul
It works like RAID 0 simply in the fact that it spreads the file across the two disks evenly. However, paging stinks. DO what Toker said and set a decent sized minimum so it never has to grow the page file in the middle of things. Paging is fine for Word, Excel and web browsing, but it can kill and audio stream and that will screw you.
It works like RAID 0 simply in the fact that it spreads the file across the two disks evenly.
Right but that's not how RAID (stripping) really works, so it's a little misleading comparing the two IMO.
Right but that's not how RAID (stripping) really works, so it's a little misleading comparing the two IMO.