Disk I/O questions

[dreamliner77]

Hey all,

I just made the jump to running Windows 7 as the only OS on one of machines (2 months ago). I had run 7 as a VM for a while before that. A couple of quick questions:

Does Win7 see a benefit from moving the pagefile to a separate physical drive? Perris, do you have any insight?

How much, if any, performance increase do you get from AHCI vs. IDE mode? IIRC, the OS doesn't benefit much from NCQ. Are there other benefits? Also, correct me if I'm wrong, but one needs to do a clean install as AHCI, correct?

 

[LordOfLA]

It depends on the primary workload as to whether you will see any real benefit and then only in low memory situations coupled with memory intensive apps (low memory being defined as under 4GB).

E.g. Windows on disk 1, page file on first partition right at the start of disk 2, memory intensive app on disk 3. If you have less than 3 disks you'll see no gain at all.

I'm not aware that AHCI over IDE makes much difference at all in terms of data transfer rates. The usefulness of AHCI comes elsewhere.

 

[dreamliner77]

I'm not aware that AHCI over IDE makes much difference at all in terms of data transfer rates. The usefulness of AHCI comes elsewhere.

Care to elaborate?

 

[LordOfLA]

If memory serves AHCI just provides things like acoustic management, advanced power saving and other hardware level commands.

[ame="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advanced_Host_Controller_Interface"]Advanced Host Controller Interface - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia[/ame]

 

[dreamliner77]

Thanks.