Windows 10: Should I Disable Paging File On My SSD?

Hi,
should I disable Page file in my Windows? I have 120GB SSD & I found some articles in the Internet that, paging file should be disabled on SSD. By the way, I have 16GB RAM.

:)

 

Should I put a paging file on each drive

All,

I have 2 Hard drives on my laptop. An SSD where all my applications are on and a HDD where all my files are located. Should I put paging files on each physical drive?

Thanks,

ABL

 

Should I put a paging file on each drive

Hi Aric,

Windows will handle multiple page files by maintaining a table where each memory page is located. Where a page winds up, it depends largely on which volume was least active when it got paged out.

You should ideally have your page files on your fastest drive. However, if you have a lot of RAM and rarely use your page files, you may want to put it on a mechanical hard drive to save space on an SSD.

Hope this information helps.

Regards,

Guru Kiran

 

You've been mislead then.

SSD reliability in the real world: Google's experience


Key conclusions

• Ignore Uncorrectable Bit Error Rate (UBER) specs. A meaningless number.
• Good news: Raw Bit Error Rate (RBER) increases slower than expected from wearout and is not correlated with UBER or other failures.
• High-end SLC drives are no more reliable that MLC drives.
• Bad news: SSDs fail at a lower rate than disks, but UBER rate is higher (see below for what this means).
• SSD age, not usage, affects reliability.
• Bad blocks in new SSDs are common, and drives with a large number of bad blocks are much more likely to lose hundreds of other blocks, most likely due to die or chip failure.
• 30-80 percent of SSDs develop at least one bad block and 2-7 percent develop at least one bad chip in the first four years of deployment.

 

It sounds like a great idea, but most enthusiast warn against it.

 

I have a 250GB SSD and 32GB of memory, my paging file is always on. *Smile

 

With 16 GB RAM many people would disable the page file (or set it to small value) to save disk space. But doing so will not significantly increase it's life. Most SSDs die or are replaced for other reasons long before limited writes become a factor. Note that with wear leveling it is the total writes that are the factor, not the writes to a specific logical portion of the drive.

 

I agree with @LMiller7 I have disabled my pagefile as I have 16gb of RAM. The pagefile was originally created back in the days of slow and low capacity harddrives and also small RAM. Its not needed so much these days if you have 8GB or more.

Since the pagefile is a disk-based system it would add more write cycles to your SSD.

 

hi,

i also have 16Gb memory and pagefile disabled.

Jeff

 

Quoting what I think is a good if not reasonable way of thinking in regards to the use of Page File......

The page file is what's used to extend the RAM. If something needs 9GB of RAM but you have 8GB, it will use all the RAM you have plus 1GB or so of page file, which is on the hard drive. In your case that's an SSD which is several times faster than a hard drive but of course is pathetically slow compared to RAM.


Disabling the page file would make that program simply crash. It would try to allocate more than it can and that would generate "out of memory" errors. With a paging file it would run, but it would be slow - the solution, properly, is to have more RAM. The other way to run out of memory is if you try to run, say, 9 programs that each want 1GB. That has a simple solution - close some programs.
I'd leave the page file on the SSD if that's all you have for storage. The correct solution is to have more RAM if that's something you bump into. So you shouldn't be using the page file in real-world applications. Things will slow down massively if you are using it, even on an SSD.


If you have a HDD as well, I'd move the page file over to that but realistically if you're using it at all, buy more RAM. Either way, that file should not be touched so it doesn't really matter where it is.

Discussions on the Page File is kind of like discussion on "What is the best Antivirus Software"..............opinions, opinions, and in the end it comes down to personal choice based on your own thoughts and needs........

 

People buy an SSD to make the system faster, then they go and tweak everything and actually slow the system down or even make it unstable.

Windows 7 through 10 were written with SSD's in mind, just let Windows take care of everything.

Once you have you're install or image on the SSD, just run winsat formal in an Admin command prompt and reboot. Windows will then "know you have an SSD and set the system accordingly.

With the newer generation SSDs,
"If you tweak, you make your system weak!"

 

Question:

If the computer has enough RAM to not need a page file, then won't Windows use RAM first instead of the page file? So what does it hurt to keep it enabled if Windows is just going to use RAM first?

 

Windows will use RAM as primary but still write to the Page File........use as much RAM as you can afford and your system will handle........and the writes to the page file will be much more limited and not needed...

 

[QUOTEIn addition to applications crashing anytime you run up against the memory limit, you'll also come across a lot of applications that simply won't run properly if the pagefile is disabled. For instance, you really won't want to run a virtual machine on a box with no pagefile, and some defrag utilities will also fail. You'll also notice some other strange, indefinable behavior when your pagefile is disabled—in my experience, a lot of things just don't always work right.][/QUOTE]
2009(older but still true): Understanding the Windows Pagefile and Why You Shouldnt Disable It


Another informative read at Tweak Hound: The Windows 7 Pagefile And Running Without One TweakHound

 

Forget that. With your kind of RAM there will never be any paging anyhow.