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My computer is set up to boot from a solid state drive (SSD).

Should I change where my page file is located? Specifically, should I put it on my IDE hard disk?

Stephen Ostermiller
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Makach
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    Take a look in this article (SSD vs HDD boot, speed etc) http://www.appleinsider.com/articles/08/02/11/macbook_air_face_off_hdd_vs_ssd_with_video.html – Matan Eldan Jul 06 '10 at 10:34

3 Answers3

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Taken from Support and Q&A for Solid-State Drives:

Should the pagefile be placed on SSDs?

Yes. Most pagefile operations are small random reads or larger sequential writes, both of which are types of operations that SSDs handle well.

In looking at telemetry data from thousands of traces and focusing on pagefile reads and writes, we find that

  • Pagefile.sys reads outnumber pagefile.sys writes by about 40 to 1,
  • Pagefile.sys read sizes are typically quite small, with 67% less than or equal to 4 KB, and 88% less than 16 KB.
  • Pagefile.sys writes are relatively large, with 62% greater than or equal to 128 KB and 45% being exactly 1 MB in size.

In fact, given typical pagefile reference patterns and the favorable performance characteristics SSDs have on those patterns, there are few files better than the pagefile to place on an SSD.

Glorfindel
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Mokubai
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Keep the page file on the SSD drive. The speed gain you get from having your page file on SSD will far outweigh the gain you'd get from having the page file on a different drive to your OS.

Of course, the ideal solution would be to have your OS on one SSD drive, and your page file on another…

me_and
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If possible, I would always put the page file on a different physical disk to the operating system wherever possible, I can't unfortunately quantity this with anything other than the fact it's what I've always done... also SSDs are a complete mystery to me.

Richard Lucas
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  • Something like this is probably better left as a comment, since it doesn't really answer the question. – MDMarra Jul 06 '10 at 12:46