james-warmuth
11-25-2011, 05:35 PM
Greetings I have a general question regarding how windows manages a swap file. I have 4 hard drives in my system all SATA and I had the idea to span the swap file across all drives. My intention was to gain a raid like effect in that the swap file could pull from multiple drives at once minimizing latency. Does this actually work or will windows just bog down looking at multiple drives for the swap file. Thanks
tokenuser
11-25-2011, 09:18 PM
Bad idea. Swap file relies on contiguous space to optimally read/write memory. The minute you introduce overhead to calculate where on the disc (virtual and spanned) you need to read/write, you've lost the advantage. Also, with drives potentially read/writing at different speeds due to buffers you add additional delays while read/write across discontinuous bloks occurs.
All in all - bad idea. Drop more physical ram in, or put the swap on an SSD.