A word of warning about booting Windows from 2.5" drive

Aris · Post by **Aris** » Thu Jul 12, 2007 8:37 am

Bluefront wrote:Neil's last question brings us back to the often-asked "do laptop drives last as long as the bigger drives?". My take.....In the past, laptop drives do not last as long as 3.5" drives for a number of reasons, mostly involving the physical characteristics of laptop usage involving hard drives. Here I'm talking about heat, vibrations, movements......all of which affect the lifespan of a laptop drive.

Now take a new modern laptop drive.....put it in a normal computer with cooling, relatively stable mounting, no movements while the drive is running. Will this drive last as long as a 3.5" drive under the same conditions? Tough question.....no answer from me. I'm using several laptop drives like this, successfully so far.

Thats a good point Blue, if anything a 2.5" drive in a desktop system should last longer than in a notebook, because its not being bumped around all day, and has better cooling.

I agree windows memory manager sucks, and is probably the biggest reason were having this discussion at all. Maybe someday games will be released for windows and unix based OS's at the same time. One can dream right?

Das_Saunamies · Post by **Das_Saunamies** » Thu Jul 12, 2007 10:32 am

inti wrote:--and most users do not have Write Caching enabled.

I agree with your post otherwise(and hope they would roll the SSDs already), and have found out personally just how insistent Windows can be about having a pagefile.sys, but on this point I disagree.

My Windows XP Professional hasn't had its disk settings tweaked or managed in any way, but when you mentioned Write Caching, I went to have a look. There's no direct option for it as there is in 2000, but there is a selection for "Performance" or "Quick removal". Performance enables write caching, and is the default choice(verified by clicking the "Restore defaults" button), thus most XP Pro users at least have write caching enabled.

Thanks for the heads-up on these tweaks, here's how you can alter the NTFS stamping: http://www.pctools.com/guides/registry/detail/50/

jaganath · Post by **jaganath** » Thu Jul 12, 2007 11:37 am

I've had my pagefile set to 0MB for 6/7months, no probs w/ 1GB of RAM.(on a 3.5"HDD).

Das_Saunamies · Post by **Das_Saunamies** » Fri Jul 13, 2007 6:08 am

jaganath wrote:I've had my pagefile set to 0MB for 6/7months, no probs w/ 1GB of RAM.(on a 3.5"HDD).

Check your OS drive. Bet you there's a pagefile.sys there.

jaganath · Post by **jaganath** » Fri Jul 13, 2007 7:55 am

Das_Saunamies wrote:Check your OS drive. Bet you there's a pagefile.sys there.

I searched my C drive for "pagefile.sys", no results.

BIONIC_EARS · Post by **BIONIC_EARS** » Fri Jul 13, 2007 12:15 pm

I complained about constant disk access in XP when I upgraded a long time ago out of the same concern for disk life, and one of the main culprits I found was the Terminal Services service which caused lsass.exe to continuously access the disk as shown by the I/O counters in Task manager (enable under View -> Select Columns).

I've always disabled the last access time stamp as well.

Das_Saunamies · Post by **Das_Saunamies** » Fri Jul 13, 2007 12:44 pm

jaganath wrote:
Das_Saunamies wrote:Check your OS drive. Bet you there's a pagefile.sys there.
I searched my C drive for "pagefile.sys", no results.

And protected system files are not hidden, naturally?

jaganath · Post by **jaganath** » Fri Jul 13, 2007 12:53 pm

Das_Saunamies wrote:
jaganath wrote:
Das_Saunamies wrote:Check your OS drive. Bet you there's a pagefile.sys there.
I searched my C drive for "pagefile.sys", no results.
And protected system files are not hidden, naturally?

I ticked "Search hidden files and folders", still no results.

BIONIC_EARS · Post by **BIONIC_EARS** » Fri Jul 13, 2007 2:07 pm

Pagefile.sys won't show up in the search results unless you uncheck "Hide protected operating system files" in Folder Options. But there's no need to search for it. Just uncheck that setting temporarily, and you should see it on the C drive if it's there.

jaganath · Post by **jaganath** » Fri Jul 13, 2007 2:44 pm

i unchecked "Hide protected operating system files", no pagefile.sys. should i be worried that it's not there?

BIONIC_EARS · Post by **BIONIC_EARS** » Fri Jul 13, 2007 2:50 pm

Why would you be worried if you disabled it and your computer is working fine. I'd be worried if the computer wasn't obeying my commands.

I wouldn't disable it personally, and Microsoft strongly recommends it not be disabled.

doveman · Post by **doveman** » Fri Jul 13, 2007 4:09 pm

BIONIC_EARS wrote:I complained about constant disk access in XP when I upgraded a long time ago out of the same concern for disk life, and one of the main culprits I found was the Terminal Services service which caused lsass.exe to continuously access the disk as shown by the I/O counters in Task manager (enable under View -> Select Columns).

Hmm, I don't know if I can disable this as my firewall's driver seems to depend on it (Kerio Personal Firewall Driver). I'll give it a go when I reboot though, maybe it will still work just without the real-time bytes tx'd/rx'd stats.

Another tweak that might help is to disable paging the executive (Google it, there's plenty of pages explaining it). If you're lazy (like me) you can just create a new text file, paste everything below --- into it, save it and change the filename extension to .reg, then double-click the file to merge the settings into the registry to disable both the last access time stamp and paging the executive.
---
Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\FileSystem]
"NtfsDisableLastAccessUpdate"=dword:00000001

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Session Manager\Memory Management]
"DisablePagingExecutive"=dword:00000001

peteamer · Post by **peteamer** » Sat Jul 14, 2007 1:37 am

BIONIC_EARS wrote:and Microsoft strongly recommends it not be disabled.

Microsoft pagefile recommendations are not for the likes of the devotees round here, the're for the likes of the Advent Pentium III 1Ghz owner with 256 RAM running XP with all the fancy trimmings, 6 Office 2007 documents open and two cases of Adobe Photo memory hog 2006 in the background that I had to suffer yesterday...

Who then complains that it seems to be printing slow to their photocopier which has more and faster memory, faster CPU and larger/faster HD !!!!!

Das_Saunamies · Post by **Das_Saunamies** » Sat Jul 14, 2007 2:00 am

Well, congratulations if you've managed to abolish pagefile.sys from your system drive for good. I find that exceptional, as I haven't been able to personally do it... it always snuck back at some point. There might be a registry option to accomplish that as well that I haven't heard of, but I sort of like the idea of having a small(512MB) solid memory file lurking in the background in case RAM fails. Paranoia, that cruel and unpredictable mistress.