[Geek] How to move the VM file on Mac OS X 10.4

I’ve managed to move the swapfile - the virtual memory (VM) file - of my new Mac OS X 10.4 “Tiger” installation onto another drive. I’ve done this for several reasons.

I have lots of RAM in my new Blue& White G3 Powermac - I’ve transplanted the 768M from my old Beige machine, a generous gift from autopope and feorag - but I currently don’t have that much disk space, only 2 x 8.5G UltraSCSI disks. Classic is on disk #0 and OS X on #1.

I wanted to move the VM from the OS X boot drive onto the other disk (#0) partly because I wanted the space back and disk 0 is underused, partly because it might stop disk 0 going to sleep all the time and partly because having VM on a separate physical drive is good for performance on all operating systems that use VM.

I used to use SwapCop to do this but it carries warnings about not being supported on 10.3 - I don’t want to risk it any more. Its author, J Schrier, gave his code to the SwapswapVM team, who haven’t updated in 2.5yr.

SwapCop:
http://homepage.mac.com/jschrier/

SwapSwapVM:
http://www.sciencequest.org/support/computers/mac/repair_topics/application_specific/osx/swapswapvm.html


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