I guess I should be a little less vague in my posts and not throw out my recommendations without backing them up.
That is pretty weak on my part and if I was someone else reading my posts I would have to think to myself “who the hell are you? Why should I listen to you?â€
I am no expert, just been in IT for a very long time, almost 22 years now.
So let me finish up by saying that Mike is correct in stating that by creating a fixed size contiguous virtual memory file does increase system performance. I did not mean to imply that it does not, sorry my bad.
Also regarding write cache, I forgot to mention above to re-enable that feature once you have finished with the defragmentation process, if you do not you will most likely suffer a serious performance penalty, depending on the applications that you use.
From a personal perspective here is how I do things.
I have 2 PC’s that I use for myself:
PC1 is my gaming computer, it’s built to the hilt for pure performance and a blatant disregard for stability and data preservation. Things like RAID 0 disks, write caching on, the latest beta drivers for video and chipset etc. I also defrag it often to help reduce load times. Other misc things, this computer lives on the edge of a serious meltdown.
PC2 is were my work is, no write caching, only Microsoft blessed drivers, RAID 1, no defragmentation , nightly backups.
There is always a middle ground that you can live in were you can have speed and reliability but for myself I have decided to sacrifice speed for reliability with my important data.
Besides, it has taken years to build my porn collection back up to good size again after that “write cache†incident a few years ago.