It shouldn't affect anything if you have the pagefile on the D drive. In fact, it is usually recommended on servers that you don't store the pagefile on the system drive, but I can't think why.

It is recommended that the swap file be moved off of the boot partition to increase performance.

Here is an article explaining it on XP but also applies to other Windows OS.

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/307886

All great comments so far. Very helpful. Thank you and I'll award points shortly

Also, is there an easy way to tell how the drives have been configured from Windows itself.

No ... if it's a RAID array Windows will "see" one drive, even though it may actually be composed of multiple physical units.

What type of server is it?   If it's an HP, you can install the HP Array Configuration Utility in Windows if it hasn't been installed already.   Look for it under HP System Tool under your programs.   Dell has a similar tool I believe but I don't know the name of it off hand.   You should be able to view how the discs are configured from these tools and what type of RAID configuration they are in.  

Typically, you'll find they are in 1 of 2 configurations.

All of them in a RAID 5 configuration where they are all configured as a single disk.
Or 2 of them in a Mirror (RAID 1) configuration, and the other 3 in a RAID 5 configuration acting as 2 discs.

Just noticed! On the exchange server the PAge files are configured as follows.

Reamining Space
C: 1.52 GB free space of 10GB
D: 40+ GB of free space  of 125+GB

Paging file size
C: Custom size: 200mb Initial and maximum size
D: Customer size 4096mb Initial and maximum size.

I was suprsed to find these settings particularly the C size.

I'm still reading articles but thought I would bring this up now just in case it was an obvious problem point.

Not a problem ... whoever set it up simply made sure there was enough room for a dump file on C:, and put the main swap file on D:  (not uncommon)

Did you create a bootable CD with Boot-It and check what it shows for the drive?   If it shows a single drive (i.e. if the RAID is enumerated through the BIOS) then it's very simple to simply expand your C: drive and make this whole issue simply go away :-)

Hmmm. OK I've been learing more thanks to your comments and the articles to whcih they refer.

Not able to reboot server as in production and I'm maintaining remotely.
As for the drives, the HP tool is available but I'm a bit scared to run it. I'm scarred of doing anything that will cause me to have to rush into their office or bring it down unexpectidely.

It interets me what you say garycase how performance could have been degraded when we moved the page file from the C drive to D drive. But then we did originally move because of some reported performance issues and the C drive space was very low so we thought we better move it over to D.
We never originally set up the server so tend to take a cautious aproach.

The problem all stemmed from staff reporting a slow response when using Outlook. Investigation has been on going and sketchy info from users as to what is actually going slow, but they are all reporting it.

I assume you understand why the performance can degrade with that change ... but just in case here's a bit more about why:

You basically have one drive with two partitions [It's actually a RAID array, but the concept is the same].  So it "looks" something like this:

CCCCCCCCCCCCDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDD

When you're accessing system-level utilities in C:, the heads are in that area ... so if the swap file is on D:, then anytime it needs to utilize swap space the heads have to move to the D: area (potentially a long way to the right, since you created the swap space with a lot of files already on D:), and then back to C:   If the swap file was on C:, the heads would be much closer and the swap file access would be appreciably better.

It can definitely be tricky to resolve this without direct access to the system and without the ability to bring it down to do some restructuring.   The total amount of potential down time isn't too bad => you need a minute or so to boot Boot-It and confirm it "sees" a single drive (otherwise the process I described won't work);  a couple of minutes to resize D:;  a potentially long time to "slide" D: (there's a lot of data to move ... this could take a couple hours); and then a few seconds to resize C:

OK well explained. I'm getting a better picture all the time.
I'm trying to work out if htis could be the reason. I wish there was an easy way to see if C and D had been partionioned onto differenty physical drives (as I assume then there would be no problem - right?)

What do to what to do. I could risk a remote reboot moving the swap space back to C drive. but then I only have a little bit of space anyway.

How likley do you think this could be the reason for the degradation in performance?

This is all on the Exchange server and it is Outlook people are complaining about?

I'm looking into now for network monitoring tools to try and record all the network traffic but perhaps the swap space is the issue.

Also note when I go into Computer Management and look at the Storage -> Disk managerment section, it shows C and D both on Disk 0.

Does that mean for sure that my C and D drives have been formatted into one big partition arbitrarily across the 5 scsi disks?
Or is it that there is no way of telling without running a specific tool?

Yes, Disk 0 is the physical disk; and logical drives C: and D: are partitions on that disk => so the logical picture I showed you above is correct.

What it does NOT show you is whether or not that single disk (Disk 0) is actually a RAID array consisting of 5 actual disks.   Whether a RAID management tool (e.g. the HP tool discussed above), or a physical inspection of the machine, there's no way to really know that.   By the way, it is VERY unlikely (I learned long ago to "never say never") that simply RUNNING the HP tool will cause anything bad to happen --> in fact, it will most likely simply let you see the actual physical configuration of the RAID array.   I'd give that a shot -- but remember, all that will do is confirm what the configuration is;  it won't help resolve the issue at hand.

Alas, I tried the HP tool and took me to a page not found with the URL:
hpapp://ACU-XE/ACU-XE.htm
So I guess it is not fully installed or something.

Can you recommend any good, robust (ideally easy to use) netowrk monitoring tools that I can install onto the blackberry server (least utilised) and that will monoitor all network traffic?
Is it possible to monitor ALL traffic now ways with switches and not hubs?

Thanks for your help so far. Much appeciated.

I'm afraid I'm not well versed in recent tools for that purpose ... and I don't like to suggest tools I haven't used.   You might "Google" a few and read the descriptions ... but be cautious about what you install.

OK gary, thanks again!.

Once last question. If I scheduled in a partition resize for this weekend, do you have a favourite software backup tool I could use for the job and a good partition resizer. Maybe I'm just going to have to make more space on the C drive.

... note  that the free demo will do everything you need to do here :-)
(but it's an excellent tool that's well worth the $35 cost)

Wow, certainly looks good at that price particularluy when coming with your endorsement.

Still would be a bit scared to run this on my clients Live Production Server, but perhaps I just need to try it on my own server first to gain confidence.

It works perfectly ...  I've had issues with Partition Magic (a.k.a. Partition Tragic) and Ghost; but NEVER with Boot-It.   The only caveat I'd provide is that you should ALWAYS have a UPS on any system that you're doing partitioning restructuring on ... you do NOT want a power failure in the middle of that operation !!   (But of course all servers should already be on UPS's)

The only time Boot-It won't work is if you have a RAID that's not "seen" by Boot-It;  or if the system is using dynamic disks (You can check that by looking in Disk Management).

So much good useful information in this entire thread it was difficult to know where to rewards points. Thansk for all the help and input.

You're most welcome.