Page file - temporary creation warning at startup

Hello All,

I've moved the pagefile to an external, USB 3, RAID0 volume thinking I would try and get the best out of my workstation (is that a silly thing to do in the first place? Sounds like a good idea to me anyway).

For one I can't see the pagefile on the volume in question. And then Windows 10 keeps throwing this warning at startup ("Windows has created a temporary pagefile because of a problem" or something similar).

What's going on?

dalchina said:

You can't. Windows initializes the pagefile before the Windows USB storage driver loads, therefore you can't put it on a USB connected external device.

This. Thanks.

dalchina said:

No specs for your PC: how many drives do you have internally?

Well, just the one. That's why I went for the external drive (which I use as a scratch disk anyways, so no loss here).
Guess I'll have to populate the other M.2 slot then.

EDIT: I don't usually run out of RAM. I guess I'll just leave this whole pagefile tweaking alone. Seems like it's only useful to override Windows' management of it in a few rare cases.

AddRAM said:

I am fortunate to have 32GB of memory on both of my PC`s

Same here

dalchina said:

One way to view page file usage:
Inspecting Page File Usage in Performance Monitor

Cool visualization, thanks. Will use it and see.

As always, tweaking questions never get one final answer. It's almost always complex and different for each and every install. But I did learn, so thanks again.

The pagefile can't normally be placed on an external drive simply because it is removable. If a drive containing a pagefile was removed while Windows was running a system crash is almost certain. There is no safe removal of such a drive. With some trickery the pagefile can be placed on an external drive but I have no interest in such. In any case it would be a bad idea.

RAID0 is primarily beneficial with large files accessed serially where the improved transfer rate is useful. The pagefile is a large file but it is almost never accessed serially. Typical usage patterns is reading or writing small segments of the file from somewhat random areas mixed with accesses to other files. For this kind of access transfer rate means very little and seek time is king. RAID0 will do nothing for that.

The best place for the pagefile is an SSD. No conventional drive even comes close. A system with 32 GB RAM and no SSD is very unbalanced and can never provide optimum performance. An SSD will benefit performance in ways that no amount of RAM can. With 32 GB RAM the pagefile will not be accessed enough for it to make any difference to performance unless you have a very heavy workload.