Best setup with hardware

[Jskid]

This is my current setup and am wondering if there's anything that can be improved.

• primary hard drive 210GB Samsung SSD
• secondary hard drive 931 GB Western Digital
• 8 GB DDR 3 dual channel memory
• 2TB Western Digital Passport external hard drive
• Intel i5 2500K processor (not overclocked)

After running Winaero WEI tool I was supprised to see my primary hard drive is the bottle neck as it's SSD. Is there a way I can tell that SSD is primary, and not the old hard drive?

I run Windows 8.1 as main computer, then with VMware I run Windows 7 from secondary hard drive (all of its files are on secondary hard drive).

I noticed with the VM running some programs take a while to load the first time. For example Maple and Photoshop take 10 seconds, but if they are closed and open again then they take 2 seconds to open. Also with the VM and Firefox running 75% of memory is used. Does this mean I need more RAM?

 

[nickc]

All that means is drive as far as windows is concerned is slower than the graphics card, memory ,and processor is. that means nothing. u'r computer is fine.

 

[DelJo63]

@nickc is correct - - we should expect the HD to be the slowest component in the system - -
unless you're on a system with build-in graphcs (aka my dell laptop) and then graphics is the bottleneck.

 

[Jskid]

Since the primary drive is SSD, should the swap file be put on the hard drive?

 

[cliffordcooley]

I've been operating my machine on 8GB of memory without a Pagefile.

http://www.forensicswiki.org/wiki/Pagefile.sys

Analysis Options
Data is stored in the paging file when Windows determines that it needs more space in physical memory.

If your normal usage stays below 8GB, chances are the Pagefile is never used. It wouldn't really matter whether you use an HDD or SSD for paging. If your normal usage is more than 8GB, then use the HDD for paging or better yet get more memory.

 

[DelJo63]

I've been operating my machine on 8GB of memory without a Pagefile.

http://www.forensicswiki.org/wiki/Pagefile.sys

If your normal usage stays below 8GB, chances are the Pagefile is never used. It wouldn't really matter whether you use an HDD or SSD for paging. If your normal usage is more than 8GB, then use the HDD for paging or better yet get more memory.

Normally, the pagefile is ALWAYS used regardless of installed RAM. You would have to configure the swap space to be min=max=0 to avoid it