Paging File

[glasze]

Paging file video - Techquickie

 

Hello everyone!

I recently upgraded my laptop with an 500 GB SSD (NVMe drive) and moved my Windows system files into the SSD.

Following this video, I set a paging file in the drive with the system files which is a SSD and another paging file in the old HDD (both are system managed)

Does that mean that the system crash files and related files will be dumped into the paging file of the SSD, while the overflowing working files into the paging file of the HDD? (just verifying if I understood the above linked video correctly)

System is running with a 16 GB dual channel RAM 2400 MT/s Windows 11.

[Mr.Zixxel]

If you have 16GB of RAM plus a swap file on your SSD, I would recommend removing the one you put on your HDD.

An HDD is terribly much slower in every conceivable way.

[cmndr]

Don't bother with the HDD on your laptop. 

It can become an external drive but for day to day use it's not worth the battery life hit. 

 

Also keep page file off of hard drives. A 99% overwhelmed SSD (think installing a bunch of programs simultaneously while running PC Mark while moving a folder with tens of thousands of small files in it) will still have more headroom (measured in operations per second) than a completely free HDD. SSDs can do something like 300K-1M operations a second. Harddrives hit around 100-200 operations a second, literally 10,000x slower in the worst case scenario. 

[glasze]

22 minutes ago, cmndr said:

Don't bother with the HDD on your laptop. 

It can become an external drive but for day to day use it's not worth the battery life hit. 

 

Also keep page file off of hard drives. A 99% overwhelmed SSD (think installing a bunch of programs simultaneously while running PC Mark while moving a folder with tens of thousands of small files in it) will still have more headroom (measured in operations per second) than a completely free HDD. SSDs can do something like 300K-1M operations a second. Harddrives hit around 100-200 operations a second, literally 10,000x slower in the worst case scenario. 

Yes exactly, I moved all the heavy programs (Autodesk, photoshop and so on) into the SSD and am only using the HDD to store images, docs, one drive local copy, downloads folder and so on. It is inside the laptop but being used like an external HDD to store bulk files (Was thinking of moving it out of the laptop, but didn't want to limit the speed to that of the USB port).

 

As paging file means constant write operations to the drive and that is inversely proportional to the life of an SSD, I wanted to reduce it by making an additional paging file in the HDD.

[glasze]

34 minutes ago, Mr.Zixxel said:

If you have 16GB of RAM plus a swap file on your SSD, I would recommend removing the one you put on your HDD.

An HDD is terribly much slower in every conceivable way.

As paging file means constant write operations to the drive and that is inversely proportional to the life of an SSD, I wanted to reduce the strain on the SSD by making an additional paging file in the HDD.

[cmndr]

25 minutes ago, glasze said:

Yes exactly, I moved all the heavy programs (Autodesk, photoshop and so on) into the SSD and am only using the HDD to store images, docs, one drive local copy, downloads folder and so on. It is inside the laptop but being used like an external HDD to store bulk files (Was thinking of moving it out of the laptop, but didn't want to limit the speed to that of the USB port).

 

As paging file means constant write operations to the drive and that is inversely proportional to the life of an SSD, I wanted to reduce it by making an additional paging file in the HDD.

A USB 3 port (300+ MBPs) is generally going to be faster than a harddrive (100-200MBPs, probably less since it's laptop drive) can operate at. Latency will also be better than a harddrive can provide. There will be some overhead but you SERIOUSLY underestimate how awful harddrive performance is. 

 

Writing to an SSD does wear it out, but in practice NAND wearing out isn't why SSDs die, it's more along the lines of "random failures" - think the controller dying or a chip just dying outright. The main exception to this would be using the SSD as a write log (think SLOG use in ZFS) which is very tough on the chips. You're not doing this. 


This is a case of you being too clever for your own good. Full disclosure I had the same worries and concerns as you back in 2009. They don't matter. 

[glasze]

46 minutes ago, cmndr said:

A USB 3 port (300+ MBPs) is generally going to be faster than a harddrive (100-200MBPs, probably less since it's laptop drive) can operate at. Latency will also be better than a harddrive can provide. There will be some overhead but you SERIOUSLY underestimate how awful harddrive performance is. 

 

Writing to an SSD does wear it out, but in practice NAND wearing out isn't why SSDs die, it's more along the lines of "random failures" - think the controller dying or a chip just dying outright. The main exception to this would be using the SSD as a write log (think SLOG use in ZFS) which is very tough on the chips. You're not doing this. 


This is a case of you being too clever for your own good. Full disclosure I had the same worries and concerns as you back in 2009. They don't matter. 

Well, it is my first time using an internal SSD, so I guess I have got a bit more learning to do. Thank you for the advice.

[cmndr]

47 minutes ago, glasze said:

Well, it is my first time using an internal SSD, so I guess I have got a bit more learning to do. Thank you for the advice.

Not too much learning to do. For the most part it'll just work and modern versions of windows handle it reasonably well. 

Hope you're enjoying your upgrade. 

[LIGISTX]

2 hours ago, glasze said:

As paging file means constant write operations to the drive and that is inversely proportional to the life of an SSD, I wanted to reduce it by making an additional paging file in the HDD.

Your not going to wear out an SSD because of paging. 
 

Don’t worry about SSD lifespan. It will outlive the usable life of the laptop, unless you are doing extremely write intensive tasks on the laptop, which would be an extremely rare use case. 

[Mark Kaine]

On 4/24/2023 at 10:11 PM, glasze said:

As paging file means constant write operations to the drive and that is inversely proportional to the life of an SSD, I wanted to reduce the strain on the SSD by making an additional paging file in the HDD.

No...

 

Its best to leave page file at default settings *especially* for people that don't understand how it works, its a none issue. its only an issue when users think they need to change it for whatever reason. 

[LogicalDrm]

On 4/24/2023 at 11:11 PM, glasze said:

As paging file means constant write operations to the drive and that is inversely proportional to the life of an SSD, I wanted to reduce the strain on the SSD by making an additional paging file in the HDD.

That video is 9 years old and probably has some information that is no longer relevant or accurate. Including the note about having page file on both drives. Thats from era where 120Gb was most common SSD for OS and it got stuffed fast. Its also from era where it was possible that mobo's could lose SATA connections on boot, so if you had pagefile only on secondary drive, you would have very bad time loading into OS.

 

Today things are better in many ways. Like as already noted, you don't need to worry about SSD. You also don't need more than 8gb of pagefile, so it won't take that much space on your main drive anyway. And if it would be too much still, mobos losing connection to some SATA devices is really, really rare.