Anyone here have a second 10gb or less hardrive that is entierly dedicated to system resource, maybe like a virtual memory? If so, is it really beneficial?

I have one in my laptop/workstation. 7200rpm. It speeds up 3D CAD somewhat.

I don't know if it really benefits me or not, but I have my Virtual Memory assigned to my second/backup HD.

Never hurts, considering the effort it takes for windows to share seeking for the program you're using AND reading/writing to the page file (virtual memory)

the biggest thing that will do is take a lot of abuse away from your HD with your information on it. Virtual memory drives fail the most. And on most computers that is the same drive that the OS and all your data is on.

it is a common practice in enterprise applications to have it on a seperate partition at least, as far a second drive, maybe but unless you are doing massive workstation type work there will be no increase in performance.

Best think you can do is upgrade your desktop to SCSI or SATA2 something 10k-15k

I have a 15K drive at my work pc and man this thing screams not that loud either

Interesting replies. My thing is how do you assign that extra HDD to handle VM? Is it pretty simple or complex?

Right Click on MY Computer > Properties > Advanced > Performance (On XP Pro, others will be similar)

also, go check out www.annoyances.org tons of good info on that site

I wonder if that'* what happened to my drive. I have an old seagate 5400 RPM that one day decided to lose all my personal documents, but decided to keep all my settings. It also shared the VM for the whole system. That may have lead to it'* death... I've since upgraded to a western digital 7200 RPM expert professional line. much faster peformance.

It'* sped up machine (or so it seems) pretty well when I added it. I have nothing on that drive except for whatever windows uses on it. It'* a 10 gig drive that MOS gave me, and I let XP have unlimited use of it. Helps out with gaming.

My new rig is gonna be 2 80gig SATA drives in a RAID 0 array configuration....That'* gonna fly.

Damn i wish i had money for a new system, i'm sitting here on my old optiplex 800mhx pIII. Basic basic, 320mg ram and xp pro corporate. <---- bootleg