Is there value in giving pagefiles their own entire drive?

Kabrevre · July 15, 2020

Howdy to all.

I'm in the process of moving all my data from multiple older drives onto a new much bigger one. I will end up with several unused 7200 drives and also a 240GB SATA SSD. Due to faster speeds I wondered if using the old SSD exclusively for a massive page file would be helpful for my system. It would be potentially be setup to use the new SSD just for Windows, a 4tb mechanical drive for storage, and the old SSD as a page file drive.
I currently have all the default page file settings and they work fine, I'd just like to utilise the SSD which will be formatted and unused after the upgrade.

Thanks a lot for reading.

Nayr438 · July 15, 2020

I mean if your writing to the page/swap file/partition constantly then yes, it will still be much slower than ram. If your really writing that much to it however, you have other issues and I would look at upgrading your ram.

Samfisher · July 15, 2020

If you need an entire SSD for page file, you probably need way more RAM than you have so might as well do the upgrade there

Kabrevre · July 15, 2020

Thanks for responding so quickly, folks.

I'll leave the settings all default if that's the case. I've got 16GB DDR4 at the moment and I have no issues with bottlenecks anywhere, I just thought that it might keep my new drive healthier if I don't allow it to have a page file - let the older one do the riskier high-activity tasks. I really have no tasks on my PC which need impressive numbers.
It might be a sounder idea to simply keep the old one as a spare. I imagine in the future we'll get solid-state drives with much better longevity. As far as I understand it, SSDs already look after themselves by routing data flow through specific regions of the drive.

Thanks for the advice. : )