Putting Your Paging File On a Second Hard Drive Will Improve Performance

Splitting up the pagefile and your everyday apps is common sense. Doing this allows Windows to dump temp junk onto one drive while not having to interrupt reads or writes on the other. If you have two hard drives, this is a tip that definitely works and works well: Expect at least a 5 to 10 percent speed boost, depending on the existing speed of your rig and, especially, the performance of your drives. But any second drive will help at least a little: While not recommended, you can even put the pagefile on an external USB drive and see some performance gains.

Follow the same instructions as the “Virtual Memory” tip earlier. When in the VM settings, click your secondary drive, add a “Custom size” or “System managed size” paging file, and click Set. On your primary drive, select “No paging file” and click Set. OK out and reboot.