Solid State and Disabling Page File

[draynoe]

Hey everyone,

Just a quick question - I've got a 128GB SSD that I'm using for my Windows 7 drive (Gaming machine) and I have 16GB of RAM.

Question is - is there any downside to completely disabling the system pagefile? (It saves me a ton of hard drive space) ... I turned it off and tried loading a few programs along with Black Ops and was only using about 4GB of RAM total ...

Will it be an issue to leave the pagefile off? ... I do have a 1.5TB disk hard drive I could store the page file on if necessary.

As a side note, I've also disabled Hibernation and disabled system restore (All I could think of eating up HDD space).

Thanks!

 

[abekl]

Disabling the pagefile is a bad idea - if your system ever needs to use some virtual memory and the pagefile is disabled, it will crash immediately. Just put your pagefile on the regular hard drive.

 

[draynoe]

Alright thanks - after disabling pagefile (moving now) and hibernation I gained about 30GB lol

 

[draynoe]

Best answer selected by draynoe.

 

[mikrev007]

if your system ever needs to use some virtual memory and the pagefile is disabled, it will crash immediately. Just put your pagefile on the regular hard drive.

The page file is not virtual memory. The CPU virtualize memory to applications. That is virtual memory. Allocated physical memory is also "virtual memory".

Or do you just mean that Windows will crash, if it runs out of memory?

 

[clonazepam]

I have a 1GB page file on the SSD. A few games and programs won't run without it. Also, there are mixed opinions on whether it should be on the ssd or hdd. Well, I have mine on the SSD and I forget the source but read something to the effect that the pagefile is mostly sequential read/write, so its ideally suited for the SSD performance. I also have 16GB ram. To save more space, disable hibernation, lower the space required for "system restore" or disable it entirely. Reduce the space used for Recycle Bin, etc etc...

You can't really go wrong with having a 1 GB swap file on either drive.

 

[pepe2907]

Disabling the page file is not a bad idea. I am running that way for years. On windows XP, Xp64 to 7 /I tried it even before being able to use more as 4 GB RAM and after introduction of the 64 bit OS-es I never used a swap except immediately the installation of Win 7 - just to see if it's dealing better with the swapping as XP, which it does btw./, and several hardware configurations. Under heavy load - database, graphics programs, CAD etc. It's bad idea when you can't configure your system.

And who say you this BS that when there is no swap file the system is crashing immediately? It's completely wrong! The most what happens is to crash a program - usually the web browser. And long before that Win7 notifies you that you are reaching critically low amount of free memory. So, what are you using, Windows ME? Or you just THINK it may crash, maybe? An Expert... Don't talk about things you never tried.

 

[draynoe]

Thanks for the information everyone