Windows 10: 2 instances of the pagefile on separate disks

HI there! Win 10 Home Version 1709 OS Build 16299.125
My desktop PC has 3 internal disks: (C) 250GB SSD, (D) 894GB SSD and (E) 3TB HDD.

There is a pagefile on disk D and another one on disk E, which is just a storage disk.

Both files have the exact same size of 33,554,433.0 KB
although pagefile on disk E was last modified in February 2017 (that is more than a year ago)
and the other one is current.

Question: Is this normal for Win 10 to have a "shadow" pagefile? Is it safe to get rid of the one
on my storage disk E?
I am fairly good on free disk space but wouldn't mind an extra 32GB.

Thank you in advance.

:)

 

Best pagefile size for Windows 10 x64 OS

Sorry I bump this question but wanted to ask if pagefile set to System Managed and Automatic memory dump then can this cause disk space to change (to become smaller, i.e pagefile increasing) when CPU, memory and disk usage is high? Today I opened around
30 tabs in Mozilla and then I noticed 2 gb from my C was gone. I cleared Mozilla cache and history but the 2 gb weren't restored. Might this be because system automatically making pagefile bigger because of high resources usage?

 

Windows 10 pagefile.sys

Hello!

About all I can say is, if this were XP, I would do the following if I had multiple hard drives (at least one more besides the one that has the Windows OS partition on it):

1) I would move my entire pagefile onto a secondary hard drive and off the C:

2) Defrag C:

3) Move the pagefile off the secondary drive and put it back on C:, this should resolve the specific issue you are trying to correct.

Here are the potential issues:

1) The secondary hard drive goes out in the process of doing this and your system will not work

2) Theoretically, a pagefile that is one contiguous file on the hard drive should reduce the seek time when the system needs to swap something in RAM with something stored in the pagefile. But, you may lose any speed gains to the fact that the pagefile
is now further away from the beginning of the disk than it was. However, I'm not sure if that is true.

3) If you don't mind flying loose and fancy free with your data, you can always just move the pagefile to some other disk and leave it there. The above procedure was suggested as a means of speeding up the computer for gaming by sharing the seek/writes
between multiple disks. But if you are going to do that, you might as well set up a RAID.

One option I have considered is partitioning the hard drive in a similar manner that I've seen Linux does in that you'd create a separate partition on the hard drive just for the pagefile, and nothing else. Preferably, in the case of an MBR formatted drive,
between the reserved system partition and the Windows OS partition (C. I haven't actually done this, just considered. Main thing would be to create a disk partition that is large enough to hold the entire pagefile with a little extra space as buffer.

That said, I really don't know how much you will actually gain versus what could go wrong. Anyone else have a suggestion?

 

No, it's not normal or even needed. There was a fad for a while to change place for page file/ virtual memory to another disk to speed it up on slow HDDs and with too little RAM.
You can safely adjust them like this:



With so much RAM you can even "kill" it completely or reduce greatly if any programs insist on having at least some. With 16GB of ram I keep only couple of GB for it.

 

Thank you for your reply, CountMike.
I relocated some of the folders from the system disk C (Profile Directory, AppData, etc.) to disk D right after I had installed the latter. Also had the pagefile allocated on it by choice. Here's how it looked like





The mystery though is how the second pagefile has come around because I definitely didn't create it.
Moreover, it's not even listed on disk E as shown in the image above. Anyway, I have it deleted, and set pagefile size to the recommended 4978 MB. No problems this far.

One more thing. After updating to the newer version of Win 10 (1709) the MSI RAMdisk has been installed as shown in the image below (I have 32GB (4x8GB Avexir Raiden DDR4) of installed RAM, and it is plenty for what I do on my PC. RAM usage rarely goes above 20%, average rate is 7-12%)





Question: With enough DDR RAM do I need this RAMDisk?


Thanks again.

 

With RAMdisk it's more of a question if you need it with a fast (or any) SSD. It's emulation of storage and with a lot of RAM, slow HDD combo, it can be useful as temporary storage or scratch disk for some programs.