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Message: <blockquote data-quote="gatorparrots" data-source="post: 965">Swapfiles are created 80MB at a time by the system, and only when needed. If these are written to the same disk as everything else, your main disk will become fragmented after significant use (even though the swap files are cleared with a reboot, they leave behind an 80MB 'hole' that often is not filled on your disk). Further, if the free space on your drive does not occur in 80MB chunks (i.e. different block allocation size), your swapfiles will have to be fragmented. This will increase the amount of seek time when your system starts to page data between RAM and disk -- when you run out of 'real' RAM, you will notice a significant decrease in performance.It is most advantageous if you can dedicate an entire hard drive as a swap disk. Failing that, a second partition (preferably the first partition on the disk for fastest access) is acceptable. This way you can access data faster if you're getting it from two disks -- while the system is paging data between RAM and hard disk, you downloads to another disk or application launch or large file read isn't taking a big performance hit. This dedicated disk/partition doesn't have to be very large, 500MB to 1GB should be plenty. An old SCSI drive would be ideal because they're fast (assuming you can get it to work with OS X). Failing that, a 2 or 4GB IDE drive would do the trick.</blockquote>