What drive should I put my page file on?

[Ren Heika]

SO I have 2 choices for the location of my page file, I have a 2TB SSHD which has a read and write of 50MBps and 40MBps respectively but obviously with it being an SSHD it does have to SSD portion on the drive that could help the performance (this is the drive windows is on) the second option is my 2 1TB enterprise drives I have in RAID 0 which get 240MBps and 220MBps respectively which is being used for almost all of my games. Don't know which one would be ideal in this situation.

[orangecat]

The fastest one you have.

[Redicat]

Raid 0 wtf what are you doin?

[Ren Heika]

1 minute ago, rrubberr said:

Neither, pagefiles cripple performance so badly while in use that you might as well just not.

I've heard page files are good though for when you have programs you are not using so it frees up space that doesn't need to be taken up in RAM. I guess in that case though the drive doesn't matter.

2 minutes ago, Redicat said:

Raid 0 wtf what are you doin?

Running it for no reason to make my games load faster because I don't care if I lose the drives or data.

[Cracklingice]

I saw a decent boost in responsiveness of my (hdd boot) machine when I moved the paging file exclusively to a solid state drive.  Granted no where near as much of a boost as actually operating from it.  Pretty sure with the paging file you want whatever has the fastest operations per second, not the highest sequential.
Also if you have a lot of ram the paging file is not really going to be utilized that much.  I have only 8gb of ram and it was common for 6gb of that to be used and the paging file to hit 16gb.

[Princess Luna]

I left mine on the HDD to reduce writing on the ssd,  I feel no performance difference.

[vanished]

6 minutes ago, rrubberr said:

Neither, pagefiles cripple performance so badly while in use that you might as well just not.

You mean when it has to resort to actually using the pagefile (due to being out of RAM) it's gonna be slow no matter what so it doesn't really make a difference?

 

If that's what you're saying, then I agree, but I can't tell for sure this is what you mean.

[Ren Heika]

Just now, rrubberr said:

That is what I mean. Once you spill over into the pagefile, you might as well have just restarted.

That situation never really happens for me, I keep an eye on what programs are open and RAM usage pretty frequently.

[vanished]

Well, to answer the question, Microsoft officially recommends putting it on an SSD since it will be faster if you do end up "activating it", but, as mentioned, no matter what, if it's being used heavily, you really should just get more RAM to avoid the problem in the future.  So, I suppose you could put it on your HDD, since generally only empty space is parked in it.

[Ren Heika]

From the sound of it I should probably just leave it where its at unless I get an SSD again for it, I recently re-tasked my SSD so I had to switch to an SSHD.

[Ren Heika]

3 minutes ago, Ryan_Vickers said:

Well, to answer the question, Microsoft officially recommends putting it on an SSD since it will be faster if you do end up "activating it", but, as mentioned, no matter what, if it's being used heavily, you really should just get more RAM to avoid the problem in the future.  So, I suppose you could put it on your HDD, since generally only empty space is parked in it.

Thanks for the advice, I planned on getting a new SSD for this system at some point but since I have enough RAM anyway I'll leave it where its at for now, I was just curios just in case the need for the system to access it ever arose.

[Cracklingice]

The best option would be a boot SSD.  Wonders for performance.
Personally I will never have a SSHD.  Just like raid 0 it doubles the failure points, although unlike raid 0 the data is probably (hopefully) duplicated on the HDD.  I just don't know what exactly happens when the SSD part dies.  If a data recovery center is required to get the data back off the HDD, I definitely want no part of that.

[Ren Heika]

Just now, rrubberr said:

Yeah, SSHDs scare me, just look for a nice big 256-512 MB cache (which is just like RAM, not like SSDs).

Yeah this SSHD I got just for a Laptop I was using at one point but my enterprise drives I believe have 256MB cache on each of them which is nice, probably shouldn't be using them just for game installs.

[vanished]

I feel like pointing out that the fastest place for your pagefile would be a RAM disk, but then, that sort of defeats the purpose doesn't it?  

[Ren Heika]

1 minute ago, Ryan_Vickers said:

I feel like pointing out that the fastest place for your pagefile would be a RAM disk, but then, that sort of defeats the purpose doesn't it?  

using a RAM disk to store RAM overflow data on the RAM? That seems like a beautiful paradox to me.

[Ren Heika]

1 minute ago, rrubberr said:

Done it, kind of fun to try out. The only other good use for RAMdisks was running No Man's Sky at launch.

OOOO sick burn! but no yeah it was bad I had it at launch too.

[Cracklingice]

34 minutes ago, Renton577 said:

using a RAM disk to store RAM overflow data on the RAM? That seems like a beautiful paradox to me.

Pagefile also contains items purged from RAM iirc.  Thus why there is usage of it even when you're only utilizing a small amount of RAM.  In theory if someone had say 64gb of RAM and set aside 16 to 32 gigs for paging it would be significantly faster to bring stuff back out of paging.  I'm just not sure how Windows likes not having a page file on boot.  Seems like you'd have to swap it around every time you shut down and restarted.  Then again, the paging file could be just fine with the drive disappearing every time windows is shut down, but you'd still have to create a new one and set up a new pagefile every boot anyway.

[mariushm]

The best would be to simply buy extra ram. 

With 16 GB of memory, the page file will barely be used so it won't make any difference where it is.

 

If you don't want to spend extra money, put the page file on the non-sshd drive and set it to a fixed size (minimum and maximum size the same, use something like 4096 (4 GB) if you have 16 GB of memory or 6144-8192  MB (6-8 GB).

 

Then, use a smart defragmentation software like O&O Defrag (get the evaluation version, the freeware version probably won't do this as it's only basic, and you may have to go in settings and check/enable this feature) to have it move the page file right at the beginning of the hard drive for fastest access and read speed (lowest latency). This works generally only if the page file is of fixed size because otherwise it's recreated every time Windows size and intentionally put somewhere in the middle of the hard drive where it finds the most empty space (so that it can enlarge the page file as needed without creating lots of small fragments of page file all over the place).

When the page file is set as fixed size, it isn't recreated every time windows starts, and it can be moved by smart enough defragmenting programs

 

The SSHD drive has a few GB of SSD but I'm not sure it stores the first few GB of content in the solid state memory, or if the solid state memory caches the most often accessed sectors (blocks of data) on the hard drive. They're kinda like a black box so I can't tell you for sure. Point is, I wouldn't rely on the SSHD to be smart enough to keep the essential part of page files in the solid state part of the memory and if they do, it would be a waste to block a few GB of that solid memory with a page file that may not be used (if you go with my recommendation of creating a fixed size page file)