Moving The Paging File To A Different Hard Disk

When the paging file is permanent, tweakers who advocate moving paging files around will tell you to move your partition to a second hard disk. Why?

As the theory goes, this allows your system to access both the paging file on the second hard disk and data on the first hard disk concurrently. This theoretically improves performance a lot! But does it really work?

Well, it depends.

Hard Disk, NOT Partition!

Many people get confused by drive letters. They assume that moving the paging file from drive C: to drive D: is the same as moving it to another hard disk. However, this is not true.

The operating system does not bother with physical drives. It is only interested in logical drives. By this, we mean properly-formatted partitions that can be accessed by the operating system.

To the operating system, partitions appear as physically-separate hard disks although they may reside on the same hard disk. If you partition your hard disk into three different partitions, your operating system will identify them as three logical drives (Drive C:, Drive D: and Drive E:). But they are still physically on the same hard disk!

Therefore, if you merely move the paging file to a different logical drive, you could be doing nothing more moving it to a different partition. So, please check and make sure you are moving it to a physically-separate hard disk. Preferably, it should be the first partition in that hard disk.