I have an older XP system (Athlon 2800, 512 ddr 2100 ram) that I am trying to make more responsive but am not sure which method will give the fastest performance.
The OS is on a 40gb 5400rpm drive and I will be adding a 2nd 7200RPM drive.
My question is this?
Should I image the OS over to the 7200 rpm drive and put the pagefile on the 5400rpm drive?
Or should I leave the OS on the 5400 drive and put the pagefile on the 7200 drive? I have read once that the pagefile should be the faster drive, but it seems to me the OS might benefit more by being on the faster drive.
Also, if the pagefile is put on a fat 32 partition, does it run any faster than if it was on NTFS? I will be using a fixed sized pagefile. Any recommendations as to which size will provide the best performance? The machine will be used to stream audio files.
EDIT: Also, If I were to up the ram to 1GB, would that sway it more towards putting the OS on the faster 7200rpm drive and the pagefile on the 5400 drive since the pagefile will be substantially less utilized on a system with 1GB RAM compared to a system with 512mb RAM?