What are the drawbacks to not having a pagefile (with 16gb of ram+SSD)

Some people say to put it on an old spindle drive, but isn't that a bad idea? Won't that slow things down, badly?? What happens without one that is so bad?

I have 8GB of RAM and my page file is almost never touched. On my desktop, i run the pagefile on my spinner drive and since it's hardly used, it hardly seems to have any bearing on performance.

If it was ok to run without a page file, I would think MS would shut it off upon sensing you have enough RAM, but they don't. It's just like they disable defrag when it senses you have an SSD.

Agreed. I have 16gb RAM, an SSD drive, and moved my pagefile to my spinner, and set its size to 1024/2048. It has likewise never been hit.

By default it created a 17gb pagefile on the ssd, which for a system with 16gb of RAM is a absolute waste of 15% of storage.

If you really don't want to move it off the SSD you could always shrink it down to a very small size.