Pagefile controversy

[entrope]

No Pagefile?
Pagefile on secondary drive (HDD) - would that slow down my system?
Fixed Pagefile on SSD? 1GB? 4GB?
Prevent read and writes?

What is the correct answer? I have seen conflicting answers throughout multiple forums.
From what Im seeing, No pagefile is bad, pagefile doesnt make that many big writes/reads to SSD, some people have a fixed size to prevent memory leaks (chrome) creating huge pagefiles.
https://www.howtogeek.com/199990/should-i-disable-the-page-file-if-my-computer-has-a-lot-of-ram/ 

I am a heavy Chrome user, up to 5 windows 10-40 tabs each. I do have multiple VM's that fill my RAM. No content creation, ie; photoshop,video editing. I play a few games here and there (CSGO, Star wars battlefront, planetside 2)
I recently had drive controller failure on an SSD and sent it in since it was still under warranty. That is why I am concerned about drive writes.
Current Pagefile: 3862MB

System:
i5 4690k @4.6 OC
16GB DDR3 1866
120SSD running W10Prox64
Multiple other 5400 HDD drives
 

[vanished]

Regardless of how much RAM you have, I suggest you have it enabled.  Due to the way Windows allocates memory for programs, if you choose to disable it, you will never be able to actually use 100% of your RAM.  Instead you will start to see "out of memory" errors at some point in the 90s of percent.

 

As for where to put it, Microsoft themselves suggest putting it on an SSD for speed purposes, but that's assuming you are actually swapping to it.  But the thing is, if you're doing that, you need more RAM - trying to speed up your pagefile as a solution is like putting a turbo on your prius to pull trailers better.  For that reason I say may as well put it on a HDD where you've got lots of space since the way it will be using it (assuming you have enough memory) is basically just to be able to say to programs "yup, I totally reserved that excessive amount you asked for", but not have to keep it in RAM where something else could make better use of it.

 

But yes, under normal circumstances, the amount of writing to it should be minimal, and modern SSDs are extremely durable, so neither of those should be issues if you choose to go that route, however.

[GoodBytes]

I fully agree. With my years of testing and experience, leaving the page file managed by Windows, unless of very specific cases (and what I say applies to Windows Vista and newer), leads to the best computer experience (less problems you face).

 

SSDs these days, as Ryan explained, are very solid. Writes were an issue in the early days of SSDs techs, but technology moved really fast, and within a few years, when SSD quickly matured, SSDs are very durable. I am most convinced that you can defragment your SSD daily, as a normal user, and by the time it becomes a problem, you would have already upgraded to a larger capacity, and/or faster SSD and/or different interface technology with a new computer (say: NVMe M.2 PCIe instead of using SATA).

 

Now, with Windows XP and prior, page file story is a different story. But that was not the case at the days the OS where released. This is because Windows XP, 2000 and prior version of Windows where designed from the ground up to very little resource consuming as hardware was very expensive. If you look at Windows XP. A high-end system, in 2001-02, was 256MB of RAM. That was like a top of the line gaming PC. Most computers sold in stores, had the OS "recommended specs" amount: 128MB. In order to achieve this (and this was not a Windows XP thing.. it affected all OSs of the time, if you compare them at the same level of features and experience), were dumping the most in can in your page file the most it can, very aggressively. That is why for example, if you see an old PC in those days, when you quit a big game, the HDD would be under heavy stress, and you see your screen being black and drawing every element very slowly as things from page file back to RAM to be processed again. (Interfaces where drawn by the CPU and not the GPU in those days, as most computers didn't have an actual GPU. They were VERY expensive. So it was nearly all software rendered. But that is a different topic, but it was part of the issues with Vista, where Microsoft switched from CPU rendered to full GPU rendered, and so if you had a shitty GPU or some Intel integrated graphics solution, the OS was very slow to interact, even moving a window).

 

So anyway, XP was used for 6 years, and RAM has increased to mass amounts. You had 1GB, 2GB even 4GB of RAM... on an OS that was specifically deigned for 128MB.. in fact the minimum specs of XP is 64MB!!! So, this is where the whole "disable pagefile" started, where under such case, such specific conditions, you actually gain performance this way. Since Vista, the whole OS was designed for new technology, and drop massive amount of legacy stuff, algorithms where scraped and redone to reflect not only for today PCs, but tomorrows. As much as Vista was crapped on, as it was too ahead of its time, (I am not saying that Vista was problem free. It was a near "from the ground up " built of an OS, and as a resulted was plagued with bugs and issues, despite being 6 years in development), it gave the foundations that gave us the excellent Windows 7, all the way to now 10. But sadly, the myth of "performance boosting" still echos today, and the SSD early days re-amplified this 'recommendation', but you should ignore all of this. Today, it is all stuff you can classify as a myth.

[LogicalDrm]

I have 8gig pagefile on HDD and really small, like 512Mt on SSD. Latter if in bizarre case Windows doesn't detect HDD on boot. That has happened twice, first time I didn't had spare on SSD and it was horrible. Doesn't make any difference AFAIK.

[vanished]

On a somewhat related note, other things have also changed over the years.  For example, if you still somehow have a HDD as a boot drive and you need to be able to boot quickly, such as moving a laptop from class to class, I recommend using hibernate rather than shutdown.  This basically dumps all of RAM to disk, making "shutdown" take a bit longer, and will actually increase the amount of data that needs to be read back to boot, but because it is one contiguous file it can be read at much higher speed than the many tiny files randomly loaded in during an ordinary boot, thus making it actually noticeably faster.  But that's not all!  Perhaps the even more significant benefit is that once it is finished loading, it's exactly where you left off, ready to go, full speed.  After a normal boot, you still need to login, and on an old install on a HDD, this can easily take up to a minute or more to become usable again.

 

However if you have an SSD, I would recommend using normal shutdown.  Since reading many scattered files randomly is not nearly as big of an impairment to SSDs as it is to HDDS (the main reason they feel faster), normal boots don't take all that long to begin with, and reading the big contiguous hiberfil actually takes longer in my experience.  Furthermore, with an SSD, logging on should always be relatively quick, and is usable even while other things are still loading, so there's just no need.  Also, as an added bonus, you won't be writing an extra 2 - 4 GB to it every time you shut down.

 

Note that this was tested on Windows 7, without "Fast Startup"