Virtual Memory on another drive

Hi everyone, I'm a new member to your forums. I just wanted to get some input on a change I recently made with my computer. I have a small SSD installed, which I mainly just use for virtual machines occasionally. My operating system isn't installed on this SSD, but rather a normal hard drive. I decided to turn off the virtual memory for the system drive and put it on the SSD. Do yous think that is a good idea, or should have left it on my hard drive with the actual operating system.

I think you got it backwards. You should install the OS on the SSD to get the full performance benefit. The page file is of minor importance. On most systems with 4GB or more RAM it will be seldom used.

whs said:

I think you got it backwards. You should install the OS on the SSD to get the full performance benefit. The page file is of minor importance. On most systems with 4GB or more RAM it will be seldom used.

thats not strictly true most programs will ask for a chunk of pagefile to be put in reserve incase it needs it if this pagefile isnt available the os will assign it from system ram making that chunk of ram unuseable and wasting resources. Pagefile is very important and is always used. yes the os should be on the ssd and so should the pf which should be left at system managed , only ever delete or change pf size for troubleshooting

in short it doesnt matter how much system ram you have the pf will always be used as "set aside"

My point was that it will hardly or not at all be used if you have a lot of RAM. But yes it should be defined even if we know that it has little or no use. A 1GB size should suffice or leave it to system managed.

With the OS on a conventional drive it won't make any difference where the pagefile is. The time spent accessing the OS on the drive (and this will not just be at bootup) will overwhelm time spent accessing the pagefile.

Any computer with 12 GB RAM, an i7 CPU, and a GTX970 video card should have the OS on an SSD. That will do more for performance than anything else.

Hi,

Any computer with 12 GB RAM, an i7 CPU, and a GTX970 video card should have the OS on an SSD.

Lol....

Just to give you an idea I still have an old Dell OptiPlex 745 running SATA II in IDE mode and it still benefits from the OCZ sata II SSD the OS is installed on.

Bottom line, if you have an SSD use it to put the OS on, if it's really small put the paging file on a regular HDD if must be.

Not that I advise anyone to do like me but I've been running every pc I've owned without any paging file whatsoever for more than a decade, probably two lol, without any problems at all. Of course, if you run software that absolutely needs it then enable it by all means.

Cheers,

You probably had a paging file too. If I remember, the system will automatically allocate one of something like 350MB or so.

Hi,

You can still disable it by setting it to 0 Mb and you should then disable memory dumping as well.

Cheers,

It is not worth going thru all that trouble - for what ??

Hi,

It is not worth going thru all that trouble - for what ??

Sure... Just to prove a point though.

I'm old enough to have been running Win 3.11 on a 100Mb drive if you catch my drift.... The days of Doublespace, Stacker and what have you.

Cheers,