Pagefile in Win11 - worth moving off NVMe-boot to small SSD or separate NVMe?

D

Down8

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So, I've been "out of the game" for quite a while. My last machine had just gotten a 120GB SSD (for $180!) before corporate/personal life kept me from spending time on The Hobby. So, forgive me if this is a know thing - I promise I did at least cursory Google/[H] searches before posting....

But, for the moment, I'm back in to build a new machine. And boy have things changed in the last decade! So I need to learn. (I have many components, just finishing the last bits.)

As NVMe's have write life spans (or some-such...), and as in the past it was somewhat sensible to move the pagefile to a drive separate from the OS &/or games, I was wondering if this still holds true? Would it be reasonable to toss my 120GB ForceGT (a fairly speedy SSD still) in as only a scratch/pagefile drive?

My [evolving] plan:
1TB Solidigm P44 Pro: boot [have]
120GB ForceGT: scratch/boot [have] / 250GB NVMe [maybe]
2-4TB NVMe: games [TBD]
1-2TB SSD: local files [backed up to separate machine; have a 1TB, may go bigger]

Is there any any benefit there? Will it extend the P44's life? It's unlikely to speed anything up, I think, but I like keeping hardware for its usable life. Any benefit at all in grabbing a "tiny" 250GB NVMe drive for like $15 to use as a scratch/pagefile drive in the same manner?

OK, school me, y'all. Thanks,
-bZj
 
The pagefile is not going to have a meaningful impact on performance unless you are actually running out of RAM on a regular basis. If you actually are running out of RAM on a regular basis, your best bet is to increase the amount of RAM you have...

Also note that trying to casually determine RAM usage can be deceiving due to Superfetch (assuming that you are running Windows). Superfetch will attempt to use available RAM to cache frequently used files so that they can be accessed quicker (even faster than from an SSD), but will immediately free up that RAM if it's actually needed by a program. Superfetch making use of this extra RAM is a good thing, since unused RAM is not otherwise helping anything. But to a casual user it can make it seem like you are using more RAM than you really are.

I don't believe that there would be any point in having a dedicated pagefile drive. If you have multiple SSDs to choose from, put it on an NVMe drive rather than a SATA drive. A "tiny" drive just for the pagefile is actually a terrible idea since "tiny" drives tend to have both lower write speeds and will wear down faster, both of which would be bad for pagefile usage. You also have the option of having the page file on more than one drive at the same time.

The only time in recent memory that I've had the pagefile have a noticeable impact on performance has been on systems that are hardware limited to a small amount of RAM, to the point where it's constantly hitting the pagefile. Older systems with only two RAM slots where it was not cost-effective to upgrade to higher capacity modules, laptops with soldered RAM modules, 32-bit systems limited to 3.5-4GB of RAM due to running a 32-bit OS, etc.
 
Just leave it alone and let windows / OS manage it, gone are the days of XP and needing to move it to a faster drive, or the inner part of spinning rust. Do not turn it off, do not set the min/max the same, nadda.
 
You won't extend the life of your SSD by any amount that will matter by having a dedicated drive for page file, keep it on the NVME drive. The SSD will be replaced long before it runs out of useful life. These SSDs have hundreds of terabytes of writes on them.
 
A lot of this would have been somewhat true at the time people were buying 120-180gig ssd, the lifetime issue of writing on ssd harddrive diminished a lot and has they get bigger the more endurance they have.

I remember making even ram virtual hard drive disk to put the temp folder in to save ssd writes back in the early days.

You can simply let it rip now, your drive as a rated endurance of (750 tbw) 400 GB being writen on it everyday, 365 day a year for 5 years, different from when some disk had 60TBW rating.

Pagefile would gain to be on a very fast drive for randomn read-write, but so does the OS, very well align to use the same drive for both, it involved doing nothing at all as well !
 
Last edited:
MrGuvernment said:
Just leave it alone and let windows / OS manage it, gone are the days of XP and needing to move it to a faster drive, or the inner part of spinning rust. Do not turn it off, do not set the min/max the same, nadda.
Click to expand...
this^^
 
Appreciate the insights. Didn't expect any performance gains, but more life extension on the main OS drive. Seems unnecessary, I guess.

Will leave it to Windows to manage (jeez, scary to say in the olden days...).

Peace,
-bZj
 
Down8 said:
Appreciate the insights. Didn't expect any performance gains, but more life extension on the main OS drive. Seems unnecessary, I guess.

Will leave it to Windows to manage (jeez, scary to say in the olden days...).

Peace,
-bZj
Click to expand...
:D

I feel you, back in the Windows 2k days where we would optimise everything, going through service disable guides, you name it! It is kind of nice to just be able to not worry about the little things now.
 
If you actually use the pagefile(s) it is best to have one file per physical drive. That is fastest and for SSDs it spreads out the wear.
 
Or the win95-98 close all process except the 2 essential one, even made some little .bat file to do it.
 
Dont worry about it but if you do want a separate drive get a 16/32GB Optane as they are pretty tough and have really low latency. Really cheap on Ebay now.
 
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