[UNTeMac]

I have one of the older iMacs and I upgraded the hard drive to 40 gigs a little over a year ago. Due to the 1st 8Gb startup disk rule, I have it partitioned 7.9Gb and 32Gb.

The problem is my first partition is always getting full due to disk paging during heavy multitasking. I know the simpler solution would be more RAM (192MB right now) but my question is:

Can I make my 32Gb partition my scratch disk for OS X, rather than my startup? How?

[waffffffle]

That's probably not a good idea, because it would require the disk head to jump around to move between the VM space and your boot disk. You're probably just better off moving your home folder to the big partition instead. VM usually doesn't take up more than a gig on those old iMacs with low RAM.

[Telusman]

I think it would be an ideal thing for him to move his paging file(s) to the other volume, he's probably experiencing a little pagefile fragmentation if his disk is getting very full and the OS is just looking for space to put things. putting the pagefile on the other partition would make it so the OS would always have room to create a single pagefile chunk and not have to spread it over available freespace. Sadly there is no feature for this, and the older solutions i've tried failed to work under Panther as they had in Jaguar. Sorry i can't help any further, but I do believe this should be a power user type feature inside the OS

- Telusman

[ul1984]

this works just fine in panther: http://www.math.columbia.edu/~bayer/OSX/swapfile/

its been a while since i used it, so i havent tried it on 10.3.7, but it should still work.

[UNTeMac]

Originally posted by waffffffle:
That's probably not a good idea, because it would require the disk head to jump around to move between the VM space and your boot disk. You're probably just better off moving your home folder to the big partition instead. VM usually doesn't take up more than a gig on those old iMacs with low RAM.

Yeah, looking at the methods required and the risks involved, I'll wait to see if a better solution comes out.

As for moving my home folder...do I just alias it and then copy to my big partition and delete the old? Thanks.

[waffffffle]

Originally posted by Telusman:
I think it would be an ideal thing for him to move his paging file(s) to the other volume, he's probably experiencing a little pagefile fragmentation if his disk is getting very full and the OS is just looking for space to put things. putting the pagefile on the other partition would make it so the OS would always have room to create a single pagefile chunk and not have to spread it over available freespace. Sadly there is no feature for this, and the older solutions i've tried failed to work under Panther as they had in Jaguar. Sorry i can't help any further, but I do believe this should be a power user type feature inside the OS

- Telusman

There is only a performance advantage to using a separate volume for VM if that volume is a different physical disk, on a different device chain. Using two partitions on the same disk is bad for performance.

[Millennium]

As others have said, do not do this unless you have a completely separate disk which you want to use for VM. Although it won't break the machine if you use a separate partition on the same disk, it will hurt your performance much more than it helps.

You can use a separate partition on any drive, but performance on that drive will suffer because the heads must jump back and forth a greater distance than they otherwise would. This is why it's a Very Bad Idea to use a separate partition on your startup disk. What you want is to use a disk which won't be used for anything else very often. The ideal situation is to dedicate an entire drive to be used only for VM, but that's more extreme than most people need or want to do.