Putting pagefile.sys on flash drive...

[jimnelson]

I noticed that Windows XP SP3 recognizes my 8GB flash drive in Control/System/Advanced/Performance/Advanced/Virtual Memory.  Can I put pagefile.sys on the flash drive?  And will my system speed increase, since it doesn't have to do as much hard drive IO?

jim

[patio]

It would probably run slower...
To test this travel to Portable apps.com and grab any portable app you like...
Load it from flash and see how slow it is.

The myths about moving the swapfile around to speed up performance are from the old FAT16/32 days and are pretty much no longer relevant...

[Computer_Commando]

I noticed that Windows XP SP3 recognizes my 8GB flash drive in Control/System/Advanced/Performance/Advanced/Virtual Memory.  Can I put pagefile.sys on the flash drive?  And will my system speed increase, since it doesn't have to do as much hard drive IO?

Memory is inexpensive, hard drives are enormous.  No benefit at all.  Besides, if you remove flashdrive while Windows is running, it will probably crash.

[rthompson80819]

As a general rule, any external device will run slower than an internal device.

[Allan]

We covered this on my site ad nauseam when XP was first released. There is zero advantage to doing this. If you are having a problem with responsiveness on your system let us know and we'll see if we can help. Otherwise, just forget there is such a thing as virtual memory and move on.