Page file questions...

[Sarra]

System is a Ryzen 9 3900XT, 32 GB of DDR4, and an NVMe Boot drive, 4TB WD Red, a 1TB SATA SSD.

 

Mostly using this for gaming and video editing.

 

How small can I set my page file, and not have issues? Or should I leave my page file managed by Windows? I typically would set it to 1024MB on the boot drive, then 2048MB on each SSD in the system, but I'm not sure if that's even a good idea.

[Coolmaster]

Just let Windows handle it. It will decrease itself when needed. You have plenty of RAM so I doubt that you'll have an issue with writing to disk, and large drives so even if you do write to disk, it won't take a lot of space.

[Sarra]

Hmm. I think I got into the habit of changing the page file size back before I had a SSD; I would install Windows on something tiny (160gb drive for Windows 7, 80gb for Win XP), and often would have problems where the page file would gobble up the entire OS drive, to the point where I couldn't install updates.

 

Then, with my first SSD, I had problems where Windows 7 would blow up the page file and read/write to it so much, I was worried about it killing the drive.

 

I will monitor what it does, and see if Win 10 will play nice.

 

Should I modify the page file on my server? It's just going to be running Win 10 Pro on a 240gb SSD, with 6 HDDs in RAID 5.

[Sarra]

8 minutes ago, linuxfur said:

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/client-management/determine-appropriate-page-file-size

I forgot to mention that my server also has 32gb of DDR3 Memory. XD It's my old gaming PC, I'm going to keep using it as a storage vault, print server, and temporarily, a Youtube box.

 

Thanks for the link, I'm going through it right now.

 

Hmm, one issue I see is: 32GB of RAM ÷ 8 = 4GB, no problem. 32GB X 3 = 96GB, which is larger than the available space on the OS drive. I have never before set up a RAID 5 in Windows, so I'm not entirely sure, but can you even put the page file on a RAID drive? The RAID is for the intent of redundancy, but if I had a drive fail and the array went down, if I had my pagefile on the RAID drive, wouldn't that... Cause undue issues?

 

Oh. You know what, I have a 2TB drive in that machine, I think I could leave it there as a secondary storage area, as well as for the page file. Though I was planning on truncating that drive, and removing it later... I think I have 7 SATA ports available for the array, though, maybe more? It's not going to be fast, I've got some dual SATA to PCIE 1X adapters in the poor thing. =\

 

Edit: Oop, I just saw the "Limit to volume size ÷ 8". I guess that makes sense.

[Coolmaster]

Page files aren't really an issue anymore. Unless there is a bug, and you have a reasonable amount of memory. It will take up a couple of megabytes of space.

[OrdinaryPhil]

pagefile.sys serves no practical purpose in modern computing. It remains a part of Windows (7, 8, 10, etc.) as a form of legacy compatibility for some very old pieces of software that have not aged gracefully.

If you have 8GB or more of RAM, you are probably fine to disable it.

RAM is (in practice) almost ageless. It can sustain a practically unreachable number of reads/writes, where even a modern SSD has very signification limitations. The more you can prevent you OS from writing junk to the drive, the better off you will be. If you use your device like most people - for entertainment, web browsing, gaming, or light office work, than you really don't need it. People tend to create shortcuts for applications you frequently use, and unless you have an extensive library of tiny files that need indexed regularly, than pagefile.sys is not only unnecessary, it's actively harmful to the longevity of your device. 

If you work with large sets of data (SQL, Access, Tableau, etc.) and you make extensive use of Indexing (Windows Search/Cortana), than you should leave the pagefile.sys alone, as it will actively break some of the software associated with those tasks.