Best Drive for Pagefile

I'm using an older machine (i7-7700K) that I built several years ago. Over that time I have made a few minor updates...WiFi card, RAM, and NVME drives (original drive was a SATA SSD). I have (2) WD SN770s installed...one is 1TB (OS Drive) and the other is 2TB (storage). I have Windows page file set to system managed for all drives. It keeps the page file on the OS drive. Would I gain anything by setting unchecking the box and setting the page drive on the 2TB drive (either manual setting or system managed)?

At a guess, all you'd gain would be a little free space on the OS drive.

Not a rhetorical question: with 32GB of RAM, is it likely to ever get into virtual memory?

My experience over the years, at least with Win95 and later, has been to use the Windows Help and Support for Virtual Memory which for awhile suggested 2.5 times the physical RAM then later was 1.5 times the RAM. Two issues could occur when installing programs, one was the requirement for a Temp folder for, guess what, temporary storage of install files and after the program was running a scratch file. The other issue was the need for a program to have Virtual Memory, pagefile or swapfile, on the same drive as the Operating System, it could be small at 2GB but at least it needed to be present. One could have a pagefile on 2 drives but best if on the fastest drive, check the drives' specs. I use 7200RPM drives when possible, have such a 2TB Data drive [D:] for my main Desktop with a 512GB NVMe main drive.

With HDDs I saw performance by turning off Virtual Memory, defragging the HDD, turning Virtual Memory back on and setting the Max and Min as the same. This process maintained the paging file in contiguous clusters on the drive and lessened the searching/reading/writing. I always rebooted between steps.

Berton said:

My experience over the years, at least with Win95 and later, has been to use the Windows Help and Support for Virtual Memory which for awhile suggested 2.5 times the physical RAM then later was 1.5 times the RAM. Two issues could occur when installing programs, one was the requirement for a Temp folder for, guess what, temporary storage of install files and after the program was running a scratch file. The other issue was the need for a program to have Virtual Memory, pagefile or swapfile, on the same drive as the Operating System, it could be small at 2GB but at least it needed to be present. One could have a pagefile on 2 drives but best if on the fastest drive, check the drives' specs. I use 7200RPM drives when possible, have such a 2TB Data drive [D:] for my main Desktop with a 512GB NVMe main drive.

With HDDs I saw performance by turning off Virtual Memory, defragging the HDD, turning Virtual Memory back on and setting the Max and Min as the same. This process maintained the paging file in contiguous clusters on the drive and lessened the searching/reading/writing. I always rebooted between steps.

Click to expand...

But "mccnavy" is asking about moving the page file from the boot NVME SSD to another NVME SSD. Would you recommend that?

You aren't recommending defragging an SSD.

Optimizing is usually Trim on an SSD and I haven't done it yet in more than 2 years owing them.

As long as program installs can find it's location the types of drives shouldn't make a difference.

mccnavy said:

I'm using an older machine (i7-7700K) that I built several years ago. Over that time I have made a few minor updates...WiFi card, RAM, and NVME drives (original drive was a SATA SSD). I have (2) WD SN770s installed...one is 1TB (OS Drive) and the other is 2TB (storage). I have Windows page file set to system managed for all drives. It keeps the page file on the OS drive. Would I gain anything by setting unchecking the box and setting the page drive on the 2TB drive (either manual setting or system managed)?

Click to expand...

The reasons folks change the basic Page File settings.

1. Some move it OFF the SSD, to avoid the "writes" to the SSD, which have a limited number of writes.
2. Some set the Page File to a fixed size if Windows is "using" the Page File too often.

In your case... you have 32GB of RAM, so Windows won't be using the Page File that much.
Also... moving it to another SSD, doesn't really solve the "writes" issue.
Only hard drives, don't have a limited number of "writes".

I would only worry about the Page File... if you have a very small Windows drive, and space is an issue.

You can monitor the page file usage before deciding where you want to put it. MemInfo is a Real-time Memory & Page file Usage Monitor

My vote is to just leave it where it is, let Windows worry about it and don’t touch it.

Same: let Windows manage it.

I also agree that you should not worry about placing it on another drive.
Those WD NVMEs have a written life of 6TB which you will most likely
never use. This has been discussed may times over the years. It had it's
place with HDD as @Ghot says but, with these new ssd's and the amount
of memory in your PC it shouldn't even be a second thought.

Ghot said:

1. Some move it OFF the SSD, to avoid the "writes" to the SSD, which have a limited number of writes.
2. Some set the Page File to a fixed size if Windows is "using" the Page File too often.

Click to expand...

3. Move it to RAMdisk, it is an interesting alternative instead of disabling it. It will always use RAM, but do not tell it.

mccnavy said:

Would I gain anything by setting unchecking the box and setting the page drive on the 2TB drive (either manual setting or system managed)?

Click to expand...

You would get some free space back on the 1TB boot drive, but that's about it.

Thanks...that is what I was curious about...if redistributing drive space is the only benefit than it probably isn't worth it.

You can disable virtual memory (pagefile) if you have 16 GB and more RAM size, as disabling it will make your computer snappy but if you want to use pagefile move it to HDD that is not Windows installed and booted HDD again moving pagefile another physical disk will helps to improve performance.
Windows 10 and Windows 11 doesn’t really use the paging file as much as previous versions of the OS, as it tends more to keep files in memory than write them to disk. However, the paging file does still exist. This is a temporary store of files that have been swapped out of memory, to speed up the computer and (on older PCs) free up memory space.

By default, the paging file expands and contracts as needed, but all of these file-write operations can slow a disk and even massively shorten the life of an SSD (in fact it can be a good idea to disable the paging file use for SSD systems completely, though this can cause some older software to complain and not work).


We are going to increase Windows OS performance by allocating PageFile to a separate drive or partition.

1. Click "Start Menu"
2. Click Control Panel
3. Click "System"
5. Select "Advanced" tab.
6. Under Performance section, click "Settings" button.

6. Select "Advanced " tab Under "Virtual memory", click "Change” button.

Now take a look under "Drive [Volume Label]" your page file is currently on the drive/volume where your OS is at we are going to ADD PageFile to a free drive or partition. Let's say my page file is currently managed on C:, and I have another hard drive called F: the only way to achieve optimal pagefile performance is to place it on F: partition/drive where the OS not at.


You can also reduce amount of PageFile fragmentation
1. Disable PageFile by clicking “No Paging file”.
2. Click Set button and click OK.

3. Open Command Prompt as administrator.
4. Type Defrag C: /x /h to perform free space consolidation on the specified volume.
5. After free space consolidation, finish.
6. Set paging file to a fixed size.
7. Click “Custom size”
8. Type 1.5 times of RAM installed on PC so if your PC has 500 MB RAM type 750 into “Initial size (MB)” and “Maximum size (MB)” fields.
9. Click Set and OK button in the Virtual Memory window to accept changes.

Since I don't want to wear out my NVMe drives by constant writes from a page file, I use an old 128 GB SSD that is strictly for my page file. It works well, and I don't care if it wears out. I have a 64 GB SSD waiting in the wings for when it does wear out.

No sense throwing out perfectly good drives because they are too small, right?