Pagefile location: SSD, M.2, or Optane?

Quartz

Quartz

Quartz

Soldato
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Imagine that you have an application which uses all your RAM and then some. As such it uses the pagefile. Where is the best location for your pagefile? SSD, M.2, or Optane? Does PCIe v4 make a difference? Has anyone done tests?
 
Best location for pagefile is on the fastest drive - ideally different to the OS drive. With any kind of fast storage the performance difference is generally minimal but access times/latency makes a bit of difference.

Optane tends to have the lowest latency IIRC but depending on the nature of how your application is using paged data higher sequential rates might win out.
 
If it's all between SSDs then where as long as it's SATA6+ won't show a marked difference that's noticeable in the real world but if your workload is filling up say 16GB of RAM and then starts filling up several more GB of pagefile then you really have to question whether you should be investing in more physical RAM as opposed to relying on pagefile.

The wise solution is leave the PF to be managed by Windows on the OS drive at all times, and invest in physical RAM that fits the workflow.
 
mrk said:
The wise solution is leave the PF to be managed by Windows on the OS drive at all times, and invest in physical RAM that fits the workflow.
Click to expand...

Investing in physical RAM is a good idea - Windows, even Windows 10, has a less than ideal default implementation of the pagefile though partly because it tries to balance across many types of workload - you can significantly improve on the settings in many cases if you know what you are doing.
 
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