thanks jr,
I guess the same applies to the OS drive-best to render to a different one?

Yea it's best to render to a different drive than the OS too. Most people set up a separate drive just for renders.

~jr

You want to keep your render away from a drive with a page file because the paging activity will be in contention with the render activity (and rendering can cause paging).

OK, so here is my current HDD storage configuration:

1. System drive (single SATA2, up to 100 MBps sustained transfer rate)
2. Source media drive (where I put my EX1's mxf's; RAID 0 - constantly backed up - see point 4 below)
3. Render destination drive (another RAID 0, even faster - up to 220 MBps sustained transfer rate - holds temporary renders as well as the final ones, like BD images)
4. Backup drive (WD My Book Studio II, 2x1TB working in RAID 1, connected through eSATA); this is the "on-the-fly" backup i.e. any change to my filesystem makes the backup update in the background .

Sounds bulletproof, but - in the light of the original topic of this thread - where would you place the swap (paging) file? As my drive no. 3 above is the fastest, I have set it up to reside there. However, this is also my render destination drive... Any better idea?

This is one of those topics where there are no right or wrongs... just "best practices" that have varying degrees of impact.

> in the light of the original topic of this thread - where would you place the swap (paging) file?

Personally, I've got a 10K rpm Raptor as my OS drive and my page file is located there. It's plenty fast enough for me. Unless you feel that page swapping is a bottleneck on your PC, I would keep your page file where it is. More memory equals less paging so adding memory would be a better solution then moving the page file (i.e., eliminate the paging in the first place).

~jr