>Does using it as a pagefile location accelerate the wear much? Am I risking wearing it out? I'm using a SSD for the OS. Would it be better to use a partition on that drive as a pagefile or use a partition on a separate 7200rpm SATA drive?
If you research it, almost all sources suggest moving the pagefile to an HDD. It's just SSD writing that can be prevented and is done to try to keep the SSD running as long as possible. If you're not using the SSD though, feel free to use it for paging.
> Isn't that if the graphics are built on to the motherboard?
It also applies when using a physical graphics card when your memory is limited to 4GB by a 32bit operating system without PAE (physical address extension) enabled. But your setup isn't affected since you don't have 4GB of memory. I have 8GB of ram. When I run XP, XP has at most 4GB of adress space, but becuase reserved hardware memory is addressed before system memory, my 1GB graphics card is addressed first for graphics use and only 3GB are addressable by the operating system for system memory use. The problem is that they only allow for 32 bit addresses which mean a total of 4GB of address space. PAE allows for more to be addressed, but I haven't figured out a way for XP to treat it as system memory. It shows the ram is useable though (not native system use though), so I set the remainder non-system ram to a ram disk and put my pagefile on it. So my operating system is 1GB graphics memory (dedicated GDDR5 on my graphics card), 3GB of System Memory, and 5GB of ram set to a ramdisk.
> Is it better to have a separate pagefile for each hard drive? I thought I could have one pagefile for all hard drives.
The article was originally referencing Windows 7. I'm not sure if it applies to earlier versions of windows. I'm not sure which other operating systems you are working with. I suggested it as a way to speed up paging if you put the page file on HDD.
"Using multiple page files split over two or more physical disks is an even better idea, because your disk controller can process multiple requests to read or write data concurrently. But don’t make the mistake of creating two or more page files using multiple volumes on a single physical disk."
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/magazine/ff382717.aspx
According to this article, it is possible for different installations of windows to share a pagefile (I've never had multiple Windows installs). You may be able to get it working with multiple pagefiles per OS as well.
http://www.mydigitallife.info/share-same-pagefilesys-virtual-memory-paging-file-for-dual-boot-multiple-windows-to-conserve-disk-space/