Stand alone 128gb SSD for Windows Page File?

GMac11

GMac11

GMac11

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I have always preferred to disable my Windows 10 Page File since I have had 16gb RAM and found it ample to handle my uses. It also has the added benefit of not eating into my 480gb SSD that everything is installed on.
However, lately I have been doing a lot of Photoshop work and this doesn't be long eating up my 16gb RAM. I then remembered I have a 128gb SSD in a box gathering dust and was wondering could I install this in my system and use it solely as a Page File drive?
In theory I can't see an issue with it operationally but perhaps some of you have experience and would recommend something else or not to waste my time on it?
 
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Nothing stopping you doing that - I'm not sure what the best configuration is for those circumstances - statically setting it to use up all the drive versus a smaller initial size and allowing it to grow as needed - for smaller sizes it isn't a consideration really but at that size I have no idea. If you are blowing through 16GB of RAM and don't want to upgrade RAM it would provide some performance benefits.
 
Statically set both min and max to 100gb or so - leave the remainder overprovisioned which will keep performance consistent and stop you burning through the write cycles as quickly

(Both assuming it's an older type of drive)
 
You shouldn't disable your pagefile, regardless of how much RAM you have. Ideally you want it on the fastest drive in your system but a secondary SSD should be fine.
 
Have to agree
Totally disabling page file can cause issues sometimes ~some software does look for a page file even if not strictly needing to use it
Even with 32gb of ram
Disabling it totally caused me issues extracting large rar/zip files for some reason
I set it to 512/1024 in the end and worked fine then
 
Cheers all for the input. I went ahead and gave the old 128gb ssd a new lease of life this evening so we'll see how it gets on. I did a quick Photoshop test and as usual very quickly filled up my RAM and no hiccups this time.
It was a good job I decided to do it because the PC was well overdue a good cleaning! A 5 minute job turned into a good 30 minutes.
 
There is zero need to touch the pagefile on Windows 10 and it is even recommended to let the OS handle the pagefile. It is dynamic enough and smart enough an OS to manage all memory tasks adequately. If your system is lagging behind application demand then it needs more efficient resources; If your 480GB SSD is losing space due to the system managed pagefile (the PF should be on the fastest drive always, or better yet the OS drive) then you should upgrade the primary SSD to a larger one.
 
mrk said:
There is zero need to touch the pagefile on Windows 10 and it is even recommended to let the OS handle the pagefile. It is dynamic enough and smart enough an OS to manage all memory tasks adequately. If your system is lagging behind application demand then it needs more efficient resources; If your 480GB SSD is losing space due to the system managed pagefile (the PF should be on the fastest drive always, or better yet the OS drive) then you should upgrade the primary SSD to a larger one.
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Ideally that would be Plan A. The cost of SSD's has come down dramatically. I paid £108 for my 500gb Crucial SSD just two years ago, now 1tb can be bought for well under that. My main concern is how easy is it to clone a drive these days? I have built every system I've owned and knew all the tricks of the trade up until about 5 years ago, but I've been out of the game a while. If I was to replace my 500gb with 1tb I really don't want the hassle of reinstalling everything and of course there's the licensing issue with W10. At this stage a second 500gb SSD might be the ticket.
 
GMac11 said:
Ideally that would be Plan A. The cost of SSD's has come down dramatically. I paid £108 for my 500gb Crucial SSD just two years ago, now 1tb can be bought for well under that. My main concern is how easy is it to clone a drive these days? I have built every system I've owned and knew all the tricks of the trade up until about 5 years ago, but I've been out of the game a while. If I was to replace my 500gb with 1tb I really don't want the hassle of reinstalling everything and of course there's the licensing issue with W10. At this stage a second 500gb SSD might be the ticket.
Click to expand...

Couldn't be easier with https://www.macrium.com/reflectfree

Upgraded 3 of my machines to 1tb NVME SSD's from normal 500gb SATA SSD's. Not a single problem, even worked with my friends Macbook Pro Late 2011 SSD replacement.
 
As the post above says, use Macrium or any others similar program and its as simple as that. As you're using SSD's it shouldn't even take that long to clone
 
Probably a dumb newb thought, but along time ago (in this galaxy), you used to be able to create a RAMDisk using DOS.
That in mind, and with with the speed of DDR4 being some 5-10 times faster than NMVE PCIe3/4, is it possible to allocate a 2GB or 4GB chunk from you System RAM and use as a RAMdrive for Pagefile or fast cache for Photoshop etc (Being volatile or perhaps created too late in the boot process, I'd understand if the pagefile wasnt a possibility but the latter might be)

Go easy I've been out of touch for almost 20yrs.
Rich
 
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