Pagefile

I am very confused about page file.
I am running Windows 8.1 (64-bit), with 16 GB of memory and a SSD drive of 232 Gigabytes. I have an Internal Hard drive of 1TB and 2 external 1TB hard drives
My page file at present is 16 GB.
The more I read about this the more confused I become. Some say to leave it exactly as it is, and at the other extreme, some say that you do not need a page file at all.

What is the opinion of the forum?
:confused

I look forward to the responses

 

Hello Julsie.

Pagefile size has been kind of a computer hot topic for a long time and it seems to have gotten
more confusing in recent years with the greater popularity of Solid State Drives and much larger
RAM installations becoming common.

With your system, as described, I suggest you set a Custom pagefile size with a minimum
size of 512MB and a maximum size of 2048MB. With your 16GB of RAM, that should be fine for
average home or office use. Some people might recommend a fixed size of 2048MB, but anything
more than that is not necessary.

Although some people seem to get by with no pagefile, that is not recommended.

 

Thank you for your response.
Do you recommend leaving the page file on my SSD drive (contains my operating system and programs), or should I put it on one of my external drives?

I look forward to hearing from you

 

With older SSD's, there was some concern that having the pagefile on the system SSD would result
in too many additional writes which would shorten the drive's life span. Now it's not considered
to be that much of an issue.

Paging File on SSD? Yes!

There are other things you can do to decrease unnecessary writes.
The first two usually suggested are to Disable Hibernation and Disable Drive Indexing.

 

last question [I hope] .do you recommend disabling Drive indexing on all my Drives part from my SSD drive ?
thanks in anticipation

 

You can ask as many questions as you like. That's what the Forums are for.
Next time you have a question like these, start your thread in the Software forum.
You'll get more 'views' there and there are many members that know much more than me.

You do not have to disable indexing on any drive.
I think that's mostly considered old advise.

If you want to, you can move the SSD index to another drive.
Move the Search Index Cache from Your SSD to an HDD

As for Hibernation, you don't have to disable it, but bear in mind that it will
use 16GB of space on your SSD unless it is disabled. When you do use it, that's a Big write operation.

===
You may be interested in:
Search Everything

 

IMHO hibernation is not needed with a boot SSD. Shutdown and startup does not take that long. Adding in the number of times hibernation has crashed on me has pushed me to recommend turning it off on all computers with an SSD boot.
Theoretically hibernation will allow you to resume your work, in reality for me the slight time gain does not compensate for the occasional crash and subsequent repair times.

 

I also turn off hibernation. Do a search for CMD at the start screen, right click, and select run as administrator.



Click Yes, then type in: powercfg /hibernate off

My Min/Max pagefile is 4096 by the way.