Windows 7: Pagefile placement on system booting from SSD

When I retired (23 weeks ago) I bought a PC that would probably last me the rest of my life. So I've ended up with a quad-core system with 16Gb RAM, a 128Gb SSD C: drive and a fast 1Tb D: drive.

I just discovered that I have an 18Gb C:\pagefile.sys and started wondering about the pros and cons of having this paging file on my SSD C: drive.

Given that I have 16Gb RAM, I could probably get away with no page file at all. I could certainly manage with the pagefile entirely on the "traditional" D: drive.



Are there any guidelines on pagefile placement in the SSD era?

SSD's want to have their # write operations minimized. So you migrate things that do a lot of writing to your HDD and get them off the SSD. In particular, Page, Hibernate, Temp/TMP, things like cache folders used by different programs, etc. can be easily moved to your HDD.

About the page file specifically - I ran for a couple of years with no page file and only 6GB RAM. I have 8 now and still no page file. So you are correct - you probably don't need it.

Well ...... I turned mine off completely when I installed my ssd about a month ago. No problems or slow downs that I have seen. Actually been doing a fair bit of memory intensive work this morning and nothing noticeable.

Hello Steve,

With the latest SSD drives with TRIM support, you really don't need to worry about the rated number of reads/writes like you used to. They are about the same or exceed many HDDs these days.

Of course, the page file would have better performance on the SSD verses a HDD.

I wouldn't recommend turning off the page file though. Some programs require a page file to run properly no matter how much RAM you have installed.

Normally, it's recommended to let Windows manage the page file. If the amount of free drive space is an issue, then one could try reducing the size of the page file. If you ever get a "low memory" type error, then increasing the page file until you no longer get it will sort it.

Virtual Memory Paging File - Change

Hope this helps,
Shawn

Whilst my C: drive is nominally 128Gb, I discovered that it also contains a "System Reserve" partition of 100Mb.
I'm assuming that this is spare space that can be used to backfill anything which fails in my boot partition. Of course, this is a WAG on my part.

Thanks for all of the replies - I'm going to remove the C:\pagefile.sys anyway. It's a significant part of my entire C: drive!

Glad we could help.

The 100 MB "System Reserved" is where the boot manager, automatic system recovery tools, and BitLocker (if turned on) lives there.

I wouldn't recommend deleting or saving anything to that partition to avoid issues with being able to boot Windows.

Moving pagefile.sys from C: to D: is done. I was surprised that setting C: to "none" and D: to "automatic" didn't cause my Windows 7 Ultimate to prompt me for a reboot… but in the absence of the reboot, I wasn't going to get rid of C:\pagefile.sys — so I rebooted anyway.

Perhaps this was because a reboot was pending after installing Seagate Dashboard?

The system felt a little faster, but maybe that was just down to the reboot. Or the effect of your car going faster after you've washed it.

Funny your shoudl mention that 100MB partition. See this for the real story:

Is it OK to recover 100MB System Reserved partition?

I'm surprised that you were not prompted to restart the computer as well.

While you technically can remove the 100 MB partition as Birk posted above, I would still not recommend to do so unless you are just real tight on HDD space. It could come in handy if needed in the future.

I've taken the liberty of changing history, by editing my previous post where I'd stated that the System Reserved partition was 100 GIGAbytes (to 100Mb)

This was because Disk Manager displayed the 100Mb partition about half the size of my 119.24Gb C: drive. So I (naturally) jumped to the conclusion that it was a sizeable proportion of my SSD, so assumed it was 100Gb.

I'm not going to worry about 100Mb, thanks!