Windows Swap Files on Two Drives

I have just gotten a new PC after a long four years of modding, resuscitating and resurrecting a P4 2.4Ghz / AMD Althon 2400+. Yes, I have changed three motherboards, three power supplies, two CPUs, 4 hard disks, 1 CDROM drive, 2 graphics cards and 4 sticks of RAM. All in all I have more than 1 Tb of hard disk space in 7 hard disks :P

Well, I finally threw in the towel and gotten a brand new computer:

• Intel Core 2 Duo E6400
• Kingston ValueRAM 2Gb
• Gigabyte 965G-DS4
• NVidia GeForce 8800 GTS 320Mb
• Barracuda 7200.10 SATA 3.0Gb/s 320-GB Hard Drive
• Asus DRW-1814BLT 18x DVD Writer (SATA)
• Coolermaster Centurion 5

The new computer is fast and quiet! However it is also very bright, thanks to the blue LED on the Centurion 5. Sigh.

Well, here is the problem. I have a old Maxtor SATA 120Gb hard disk lying in my cupboard after my first motherboard with a SATA controller died. All my subsequent motherboards does not have SATA controller. Since the 965G-DS4 can support up to 6 SATA drives, I was more than happy to pop the Maxtor into the computer.

After assembling a new computer, the natural thing for a geek to do is to optimize the system to run at the most optimum speed right? And when you have an additional drive in the computer, you will want to move the Windows paging file to the non-system drive right? But wait. The new drive is SATA2 while the old one is SATA only, therefore it will be a lot faster right?

A quick check using Nero DriveSpeed confirms my suspicion: the new Seagate is at least two times faster than the old Maxtor. So does it makes sense to move the paging file to the another slower drive, or should I leave it on the current faster drive, considering that I have 2Gb RAM, so swapping should be rare (yeah right...)

After some searching, I found the perfect solution: two swap files, one on the faster system drive and one on the older drive. Turns out that Windows will automatically select the faster drive to write to. Clever piece of software :P