Paging file help needed

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Alanthor

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Mar 17, 2014
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GOT DAMNIT.... I accidentaly clicked "Back", so all text was deleted... Short here...

I got 2 disks. Local disk (E:/) and Samsung SSD (C:/). I have my games, OS and some system tools/tweaking softwares on my SSD, and all downloads and installers of every kind on my HDD.

Atm, my OS has assigned 8192MB as paging file, and that leaves me with just 3-4GB left on my SSD... Do I really need paging file? Can I have it on my HDD instead?..

Thx in advance.

Windows 8.1
8GB RAM
 
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rhysiam

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Mar 24, 2013
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You can move it, that's the best this to do.

Open File explorer -> Right Click "This PC" -> Properties -> Advanced System Settings -> Advanced -> "Performance Tab" Settings -> Advanced -> Virtual Memory "Change".
You can then click on your second HDD, add a System Managed Page file on it, and then set "No Paging File" on your SSD. One you've OK'd a few times you'll reboot and the page file will be on your E drive only.

BTW... best practice is a good 20% free space for an SSD. Performance and write cycles take a significant hit when you run near capacity on most consumer level drives. I'd recommend you free up some more space as well as moving the page file if you can.
 
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ShadyHamster

ShadyHamster

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Jan 3, 2012
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There's no point in moving the pagefile to a HD, that partially defeats the purpose of having an SSD.
If you have 8gig+ memory i would suggest downsizing the pagefile size to maybe 1-2gig leaving the max around 8gig.

You can also regain a few gig of space if you disable hibernation (providing you don't use this feature)
In an admin cmd prompt enter: "powercfg -h off".
There is no confirmation but you should notice a few extra gig free on c drive.
 
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Alanthor

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I dont have hibernation enabled. And I have Samsung Magician installed, optimized for performance, and OS optimized and RAPID mode enabled. Or well, not now, but usually I have it enabled.

And why would moving the pagefile to my HDD defeat the SSD purpose?... My purpose with my SSD is to lower the boot time and loading time on games... Im confused here..
 
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rhysiam

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Your pagefile is used by the system when there's no enough available memory. It will use "virtual memory" (the pagefile, located on a HDD/SSD), by coping the lowest priority data from RAM to virtual memory, thus freeing up the space in RAM for more important data.

The problem is that a HDD (even a top-tier SSD in fact) is massively slower than RAM, meaning that if you actually need the data in virtual memory, things are going to be really slow while the system frees up RAM and copies things from the virtual memory back into physical memory again. The easiest place to spot it is when you have lots of applications open. Clicking on different applications immediately brings them up, because all the data is stored in RAM. Run out of RAM and click on an application relying on data that the OS decided to move to the pagefile and you'll see the Window gradually appear piece by piece as the HDD gets hammered for the data.

In these situations SSDs are waaay faster than HDDs and will prevent the massive slow downs you can experience when paging to a HDD. I suspect @ShadyHamster is suggesting that if you are having to page regularly, you're much better doing it to an SSD than a HDD.

While I agree to a point, 8GB RAM should be enough for all but extreme use cases and I'd be surprised if you found yourself regularly hitting the pagefile in a way that impacts on user experience (unless you're into high end video/photo editing). When I started to chew up space on my 120GB Samsung SSD I moved the pagefile (I also have 8GB RAM). I occasionally work in Photoshop and adobe Premiere, and regularly have a heap of programs and Chrome tabs open and can't say I've noticed a difference.
You can just drop the size of the pagefile as has been recommended, it's up to you.
 
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Alanthor

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I moved the pagefile to my HDD, now the pc get's weird freezes in like 2seconds some times when I open programs, like Chrome, or going to another website.. And as it occurs, the hard faults/sec also spikes up all the way up.

Why?
 
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Pinhedd

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A hard fault occurs when the operating system needs to bring data into memory from secondary storage (typically a hard disk drive) before it can proceed. A hard fault occurs either when program memory has been swapped out of physical memory to make room and needs to be brought back in, or when that memory has never been brought into main memory before (occurs with memory mapped files)
 
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klrman

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Late observation, but I disabled page file in Win-7 as I use a SSD with 8GB RAM and so far after several months of intensive use, I don't notice any ill effect whatsoever. System flies with all tasks thrown at it.
 
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