However, my Diskeeper program recommends that I still have a paging file (no matter how small) on the system partition!
Bollocks!
I am not aware of any such requirement, and I have not had a swapfile on the C drive for years!
The only reference that I can find for this is for "an emergency" - what sort of emergency is that then? If a disk containing the pagefile has failed, you probably aren't going to be worrying too much about the state of the page file! You are probably more concerned about the failed disk and all the data that's on it!
It is, however, true that you cannot have a pagefile larger than 4095 on any single volume; this limit is imposed by the page mapping that MS use on x86 processors. These processors cannot handle more pages per page file and so to have swap space greater than 4095 you would need to create pagefiles on multiple volumes (or in multiple folders on a single volume).
The recommendation from MS is that the size of page file is 1.5 x actual RAM for RAM < 2 GB and 1 x actual RAM for RAM >= 2 GB. So a 4 GB pagefile is still fine for the max. supported RAM.
There is more
here from MS.
Note that there is actually a slight perfomance gain in spreading the paging file over more than 1 physical disk, but a performance penalty in spreading it over multiple partitions on a single physical disk.
If you only have one disk, leave it on C, or create a dedicated partition. If you have more than 1 disk, put it on the non-system partition disk.
Creating a decicated partition for the pagefile does not help with fragmentation of the page file, however it does prevent the pagefile contributing to fragmentation on other partitions. Creating a fixed-size pagefile does help prevent fragmentation of the page file.
More
here.
SD